Custom Data - Ruddr Help

The Custom Data section of the Settings area allows Workspace Admins to manage Ruddr metadata. Note that all custom data entities can be exported. See the Export Custom Data section of this article for more information.

Figure 1 - Custom Data option in the Settings Area

Figure 2 - Expandable Custom Data Categories Within the Custom Data screen, entities will be organized into 6 categories (Figure 2):

Billing
Clients and Projects
General
Members
Pipeline
Tasks

You can collapse and expand each of these categories as needed.

Managing Custom Data

There are four types of custom data types that can be managed here:

Lookup Data
Organizational Data
Tags
Templates

Lookup Data

Lookup data refers to data that is associated with an entity in Ruddr. For instance, a time entry may be assigned a “Time Entry Type” or a workspace member may be assigned a “Job Title”. The reports in Ruddr can be filtered by lookup data. Below are the lookup data custom data entities available in Ruddr:

Disciplines - Disciplines represent a general skill area that can be assigned employees and project roles. For example, the employees in various project management job titles might be assigned to a single Project Management discipline.
Expense Categories - Expense categories are used for the individual expense items on expense reports. Each expense item must be assigned an expense category. For more information on managing expense categories, see the separate expense category article.
Industries - Each client can be assigned a vertical industry.
Invoice Items - Every line item on a Ruddr invoice must have an invoice item. The invoice item is the category of the charge to the customer, such as Service or Expense.
Job Titles - Each workspace member can be assigned a job title.
Locations - Each workspace member and client can be assigned a location.
Member Levels - Each workspace member can be assigned a member level (such as Associate, Senior, or Lead).
Member Skills - One or more skills can be associated with each workspace member.
Member Certifications - One or more certifications can be assigned to each workspace member.
Payment Methods - Every payment in Ruddr can be assigned a Payment Method.
Practices - Larger professional services companies often organize service offerings and/or personnel into practices. You can assign a Practice to each member, client, and project in Ruddr.
Project Types - Every project in Ruddr can optionally be assigned a project type. Assigning a project type helps you analyze the performance of specific segments of your project portfolio.
Time Off Types - When a workspace member creates a time off entry, the member must select a Time Off Type. A standard set of time off types are provided with each workspace but you can tailor these to your organization’s preferences. Time off types can be configured as paid or unpaid. Note that the “Holiday” time off type can be edited and deactivated, but not deleted. Ruddr uses this special time off type when automatically creating holiday time off entries.

For more on unpaid time off, please refer to the Ruddr Help Center article How does Ruddr Handle Unpaid Time Off? When the Pipeline feature is enabled, you will have additional custom data entities to manage:

Company Spend Tiers - Categorize companies based on the annual spend.
Company Types - Categorize companies within the pipeline.
Opportunity Lead Sources - Track how you generated an opportunity.
Opportunity Pipelines - Leverage multiple opportunity pipelines to track different sales processes via opportunity stages.
Opportunity Stages - Track the progress of opportunities via stages with associated probabilities.
Opportunity Types - Categorize opportunities within the pipeline.
Pipeline Activity Types - Track the various types of activities during the sales process.

When utilizing tasks on projects, the following custom data entities are available:

Task Tags - Can be assigned to each task within a project. This allows you to define custom task attributes.
Task Categories - Allows you to define multiple categories of tasks to be used in projects. Each category can be created as either a Standard or Rollup category type. Time can be tracked directly to a standard task while a rollup task aggregates time from its child tasks.
Task Templates - Allow standard tasks to be easily added to projects.

Task Categories

The Task Categories list (Figure 4) shows each category’s icon, color, name, type, and active status. From this screen, you can create a new category, edit or delete an existing one, set a category as the workspace default, and activate or deactivate a category.

Figure 4 - Manage Task Categories Only standard categories can be set as the workspace default. The default category cannot be deactivated — to deactivate a category that is currently the default, first set a different standard category as default. When creating or editing a category (Figure 5), you can specify the following:

Name - The display name of the category.
Color - The color used to render the category’s icon throughout Ruddr.
Icon - The icon shown next to the task name wherever the task appears.
Type - Either Standard or Rollup, as described above. The type is required when creating a new category.

Figure 5 - Configure a Task Category Note that the Type is set when the category is first created and becomes read-only once the category has been assigned to any task or set as the workspace default. This prevents tasks from suddenly losing their tracked time (if a standard category were converted to rollup) or their rollup behavior (in the reverse direction). If you need to change the type of a category that is already in use, create a new category with the desired type and reassign the affected tasks to it. A category can only be deleted if it is not the workspace default and is not assigned to any task. Categories that are no longer needed but cannot be deleted can be set to inactive — inactive categories are hidden from task selectors but remain on existing tasks.

Task Templates

Task Templates for project tasks (Figure 6) can be created and managed in the Custom Data section of Ruddr. Once created, these task templates can be added as tasks to projects in the workspace.

Figure 6 - Manage Task Templates for Project Tasks When creating task templates (Figure 7), baseline information for tasks can be provided. For more on tasks and the various settings and properties that can be defined when added to projects, please refer to the Project Tasks article in the Ruddr Help Center.

Figure 7 - Provide Fundamental Task Information as Part of the Task Template

Edit Lookup Values

To edit a lookup value, simply click the edit (pencil) icon on the row (Figure 7) that you wish to edit. This will open the edit drawer (Figure 8) for that custom data entity.

Figure 7 - Click on the Edit Icon to Edit a Custom Data Value

Figure 8 - Editing Lookup Data Add Lookup Values Above each lookup table is an New… button (Figure 9) that allows you to add a new item to the table. For example, to add a new Discipline to the Discipline lookup, simply click the button shown below.

Figure 9 - Add Button for Lookup Data Delete or Deactivate Lookup Values You can delete a lookup item if it is not currently in use within Ruddr. If the item is in use, then the Delete option will be disabled and you can only Deactivate the item (Figure 10). When a lookup item is deactivated, it can no longer be selected for new data entries in Ruddr but past entries will remain unchanged.

Figure 10 - Managing a Lookup Data Item

Organizational Data

Organizational Data refers to data that is unique to your organization, but does not necessarily factor in to the data or structure of Ruddr’s primary entities (projects, clients, members). The various types of Organizational Data that can be managed in the Custom Data section are:

Business Units
Workspace Roles and Rates
Resource Placeholders
Holidays
Holiday Schedules
Payment Terms
Tax Rates
Exchange Rate Periods

Business Units

The Business Units feature in Ruddr enables this element in Custom Data. You can define various entities within your organization and link those business units to clients and projects. Additionally, you can specify varying invoice details and settings for each business unit, allowing you to send invoices from different entities. With the Multiple Accounting Integrations feature enabled, each business unit can be associated with a specific accounting integration, allowing you to save that business unit’s project invoices to a specific accounting instance.

Workspace Roles and Rates

Leveraging Workspace Roles and Rates in Ruddr allows you to define, at a workspace level, a standard rate card for your organization. You can link clients within your workspace to these roles and rates, and then add those roles and rates to projects where clients leverage them. The workspace administrator can establish this rate card in the Custom Data section (Figure 11) of Workspace Settings. Note that any changes to existing Workspace Roles and Rates in Custom Data will be reflected in all clients that link to these roles / rates.

Figure 11 - Set up a Standard “Rate Card” for your Workspace Multicurrency Workspaces that leverage Ruddr’s multicurrency feature will have the ability to specify workspace roles and rates for each currency being used by the workspace.

Resource Placeholders

Resource placeholders (Figure 12) should be used when you are not certain which team member should be assigned to a project but want to assign the hours of the project to a “placeholder” role. Creating a resource placeholder (Figure 13) allows for the assignment of a practice and a discipline to the record. Assigning these values to a placeholder provides you with the ability to track resource needs at a more granular level across your organization and workspace.

Figure 12 - Create Resource Placeholders to track Tentative Project Assignments When editing a Resource Placeholder (Figure 13), you can also set the average bill rate and average cost per hour for the placeholder. The average cost per hour is used when calculating the future projected cost, gross profit, and gross margin for a project. The average bill rate is used for calculating the future projected revenue on projects that do not have the Use Roles option turned on. For projects that use roles, the bill rate used to calculate projected revenue is the rate of the role assigned to the resource allocation. Multicurrency Note that when Ruddr’s multicurrency feature is enabled in the workspace, admins may configure the currency for either or both of the average bill rate and average cost per hour values. In regards to the Rate Currency, the placeholder can only be allocated to projects that use that same currency.

Figure 13 - Provide Average Cost per Hour and Average Bill Rate for a Resource Placeholder

Holidays

Ruddr has over 130 built-in, standard holidays, all of which can be managed within the Custom Data section (Figure 14). If your company observes a holiday that is not built-in, you can create a custom holiday (Figure 15). All holidays can be added to your holiday schedules. In the holidays list (Figure 14), you can filter the list of holidays by Holiday Schedule to see which holidays are associated with a particular schedule. Also, you can see the associated holiday schedule(s) for each holiday in the Holiday Schedule column of the list.

Figure 14 - Manage Holidays for Your Workspace

Figure 15 - Create a Custom Holiday to Accommodate a Data not Built into Rudd Auto-creation of Holiday Time Entries Note that you can configure Ruddr to automatically create holiday time off entries for your members. For more on that setting, please refer to this Time and Expense Settings section of the General Workspace Settings article in the Ruddr Help Center. For those workspaces that leverage Ruddr’s BambooHR Integration, you may want to ensure that this setting is turned off if you handle holidays as PTO requests in BambooHR, as those would be synched via that integration and having this setting checked may result in duplicate holiday time entries.

Holiday Schedules

Ruddr offers a number of international holiday schedules for you to use or customize. To add one of these schedules, simply click the Add from Available Schedules action menu item (Figure 16) on the New Holiday Schedule button. A list (Figure 17) of Ruddr-provided holiday schedules will be presented from which you can add any number of schedules to your workspace.

Figure 16 - Add a Ruddr-managed Holiday Schedule to Your Workspace

Figure 17 - Select from a List of Ruddr-managed Holiday Schedules If the Ruddr-managed holiday schedules do not meet your needs, you can create multiple holiday schedules (Figure 18) for your workspace. A holiday schedule can be assigned to each member. Manage your holidays in the Holidays custom data, then assign multiple holidays to a holiday schedule (Figure 19).

Figure 18 - Manage Your Workspace’s Holiday Schedules

Figure 19 - Assign Holidays to a Holiday Schedule

Cloning a Holiday Schedule

If you need to copy a full holiday schedule, you can do so by cloning an existing holiday schedule. You can do so by selecting the carrot on the right side of the original schedule and selecting clone (Figure 20). You will then be prompted to update the holiday schedule name and add a description. Once saved, you will be ready to assign and use your new schedule.

Figure 20 - Cloning a Holiday Schedule

Statutory holidays

Statutory holidays (often called “stat holidays”, “bank holidays”, or “public holidays”) are holidays officially recognized by law that employees are typically required to take off from work and receive pay. Ruddr handles statutory holidays differently than non-statutory holidays, as described below:

Statutory holiday time off entries are always created automatically by Ruddr. Every weekend, Ruddr will create statutory holiday time off entries for the forward week.
Statutory holiday time off entries are automatically approved by Ruddr upon creation. These time off entries do not have to be manually approved.
Statutory holiday time off entries will be locked for all workspace members, other than Workspace Admins.
Statutory holiday time off entries are created even if the member does not have permission to create time off entries or does not have permission to create holiday type time off entries.

For more on statutory holidays, please refer to the Ruddr Help Center article How are statutory holidays handled in Ruddr?

Payment Terms

Payment Terms are used to calculate the due date of an invoice and communicate the terms by which the due date is determined. You can then specify a particular payment term when providing the invoice details on a client or a project. There are a number of “system” payment terms that are created with new workspaces. In addition to these, you can create / define any number of custom payment terms. When creating a new Payment Term, you be prompted for a number of fields (Figure 21):

Type - choose from one of two types:
- Net - specify the number of days following the issue date to establish the due date of an invoice
- Net End-of-Month - specify the number of days after the end of the month in which the invoice is issued to establish the due date of that invoice
Days
Name

Figure 21 - Create a New Payment Term in Custom Data

Tax Rates

Tax Rates are used to associate an invoice with a specific tax rate percentage. These tax rates can then be used to apply tax to line items on Ruddr invoices. Edit / add Custom Tax Rates inline on the Tax Rates screen (Figure 22).

Figure 22 - Manage Custom Tax Rates for Your Workspace

Exchange Rate Periods

Workspaces that have enabled the Multicurrency feature in Ruddr will have the ability to provide a set of custom exchanges rates for specific date ranges. Essentially, these exchange rate periods offer the ability to override the exchange rates used by Ruddr in converting financial data from one currency to another. For more on how Ruddr approaches this conversion, please refer to the Help Center article Currency Conversion Overview. When creating an exchange rate period (Figure 23), you provide the two currencies for which the exchange rate will be created and will then provide the rate of exchange for one currency to the other. Additionally, you will provide the Start and End Dates for the period during which this exchange rate will take effect.

Figure 23 - Provide Details for Custom Exchange Rate Period In the above example (Figure 24), the exchange rate from USD to ARS will be effective for all of 2025 and any monetary conversions in Ruddr from USD to ARS or from ARS to USD will leverage the exchange rate provided.

Exporting Custom Data

All Custom Data can be exported to multiple formats: Microsoft Excel or Comma-Separated Values (CSV). To export any custom data values, navigate to the data screen by clicking on any of the boxes on the Custom Data Section (Figure 2). Then, click on the download icon (Figure 25) at the top-right of the screen. This will drop down a list of formats (Figure 26). Select the desired format for the data and then click the Download button (Figure 27) to download

Figure 25 - Download Your Custom Data

Figure 26 - Choose the Desired File Format

Figure 27 - Download the File Once it is Ready

Documentation Index

​Managing Custom Data

​Lookup Data

​Pipeline-Related Custom Data Entities

​Task-Related Custom Data Entities

​Task Categories

​Task Templates

​Edit Lookup Values

​Organizational Data

​Business Units

​Workspace Roles and Rates

​Resource Placeholders

​Holidays

​Holiday Schedules

​Cloning a Holiday Schedule

​Figure 20 - Cloning a Holiday Schedule

​Statutory holidays

​Payment Terms

​Tax Rates

​Exchange Rate Periods

​Tags

​Managing Tags

​Exporting Custom Data