Building a strong foundation is an essential process of building a home. Even though this might not be as exciting as decorating rooms, buying new furniture or painting walls, setting that strong foundation is what makes it last forever.
Just like with building a house, essential setup is as equally important in Streamtime. Not only may it save you time, but it will definitely set you up for a smoother and more successful way to run your business.
We get it. The last thing everyone wants to do, after signing up to beautiful software, is to go through Profile & Settings.
You might say:
“I will set things up as I go.”
Okay, but I can guarantee you will waste crucial time going back and forth from one section to another for the first few months. And quite often, wasting time means wasting money. I’ll let you make this decision for yourself.
“I don’t want to waste my time in Profile & Settings and realise that this isn’t a tool we are looking for”
Fair enough! The only way to see the true value of our product is by using it to the best of its abilities. You can only get out of Streamtime, what you put in. We can’t produce those valuable insights if the data’s not there.
“I only need to use Streamtime for managing internal projects, I’m not interested in financial analysis.”
Sure, you aren’t quoting or invoicing so don’t need information about your job profitability. But, wouldn’t it be great to be able to share meaningful insights with your management, likewhere you spend most of your time? How efficient is your job process and how you’ve improved an overall workflow in your department? Surely that calls for a pay rise!
No matter what type of user you are, Streamtime will benefit you in the long run – if you let it. Let’s have a look at areas that you should prioritise when starting with Streamtime.
Your Profile
We’ve made it easy for you to plan around your work days and available hours. Setting up your work hours will display on the Schedule and everyone in your team will be aware of when you can or can’t be scheduled. Adding your Billable Hourly rate at the start will help with job planning and its consistency. Cost rates are equally as important as they will provide valuable insights on your job profitability.
Your Team
When adding a team member, we’ll get you to setup some basic info about that person. Things like their name, email address, plus their hourly cost and sell rates to help keep all your numbers in balance. There are a few crucial things that your team’s cost rates should account for: their wage, overheads and running costs, and we’d suggest adding some profit in the too, to ensure that the perceived cost in Streamtime is always slightly greater than the true cost. This means that if profit in Streamtime is looking healthy, it’ll be looking even better in your bank account.
You’ll also be able to grant them access to different areas in Streamtime, if you don’t want them to see these or other team member rates
Pro Tip: you can easily add a team member from the Job page or the Schedule.
Company Settings
Think of it as your brand new kitchen. Ideally, you’d want to have everything in order before starting to cook! Organise things like job numbers so that when it’s Go Time, your process will be consistent from the start. There are three ways of working when it comes to job numbering in Streamtime. You can simply set up an automated job number from any starting point or alternatively use a mixture of job numbers & client codes – it’s completely up to you.
Items & Expenses
Instead of building your job plan from scratch every time, you can save time by building a list of items and expenses that you use regularly. By adding a sell rate to newly created items & expenses you are creating your own rate card.
Pro tip: Items & Expenses can be linked with your accounts codes / nominal codes if using Xero; Quickbooks Online or MYOB
Integrations
Whether it’s your accounting software or your calendar, you can set up integrations straight away. Just set and forget and let Streamtime look after everythihttps://streamtime.net/blog/get-paid-invoicing-credit-notes-accounting-integrations/ng else!
And just like that you’ve set yourself up for success with Streamtime!
