Progress claims in Drum allow for structured payment claims or payment applications with your client, with a clear breakdown of the:
Total project budget per claim item (which we'll cover shortly).
The amount being claimed in any single progress claim.
The amount previously claimed in historical progress claims.
The remaining budget per claim item.
Compared to generating an invoice directly from a Drum project , claims ensure structure and a simpler invoicing flow when your customer expects a formatted structure.
💡 Progress claims in Drum do not replace invoices, but are a formal step prior to creating an invoice. It allows you to claim progress on key claim items (deliverables OR tasks) and create a progress claim PDF document that can be attached to the invoice (and flow through to Xero).
Using progress claims is an effective way of adding more detail to Xero invoices where required.
Video Overview
Enabling progress claims in Drum
Progress claims in Drum are an optional feature, and can be turned on by navigating to your Drum settings, then the "Features" option in the sidebar and finally toggling on the "Enable 'Progress Claim' functionality for projects" option.
Once enabled, you'll now have a new "Claims" tab available on your projects, to the left of the "Invoices" tab.
Progress claims can optionally show additional company and billing information too. These details can be set from the "Billing Details" option in your Drum settings, beneath the "Financial Settings" sub-heading.
The details set here will be displayed on your progress claim, so should be your company's billing details.
The current version of the Progress Claim feature does not show the "Bank Details" fields on claims, but it may in the future as we add more claim templates over time.
Creating a Claim For a Project
To create a new progress claim for a project, navigate to a project and click on the "Claims" tab.
In the example above, we don't have any existing progress claims, so the table is empty.
We can create a new Progress Claim by clicking on the "Add Progress Claim" button in the top-right of the page.
When creating a progress claim for a project for the first time, we have the ability to nominate if the claim should be made at the Deliverable level or the task level. Once a project has a claim nominated at either of these levels, all future claims must also be made at this level to ensure consistency in budget tracking.
💡 Making progress claims at the deliverable level with generally be the right choice for most projects.
Only when you need a very detailed progress claim where you want to report on and claim at every single task, should you consider creating a task-based claim.
Clicking on "Save and Edit" will create a progress claim for the project.
Managing a Progress Claim
Now that your progress claim has been created, you can start to determine how much budget per claim item (the deliverable or task level that you're claiming at) should be claimed within this progress claim.
A claim tracks two key concepts:
The internal billable costs or effort (both time & expenses) that are "claimable" in this claim.
The Budget /Contract Value being claimed per item.
Allocating Internal Time and Expenses (and building V0.1 of your claim)
By default, your claim will be empty of both project costs (billable time & expenses) and any claim value. To begin, it's generally a good idea to allocate the internal effort (your costs) to each claim item.
To do this across the whole claim, you can click on the "Claim All Billables in Period" button below the claim table:
In one click, this will increment your "Claim Total" for each item row to match the internal billables you've recorded in Drum during the period being claimed:
In the above example, we can see based on the "Costs in Period" column and the "Claim Total" column that we've successfully claimed 100% of our internal billable time and expenses during the claim period to their respective claim items (deliverables in the example above).
Of course the claim itself doesn't need to directly reflect the internal effort in the case of fixed-price phases or deliverables, but this is a great start for time & material deliverables.
By claiming all billables in the period, Drum has also broken down what those claimed items are in the bottom section of the progress claim page.
Here we can see the time entries that have been allocated to each deliverable, which make up the initial $2,400 being claimed above.
💡 You can adjust these time entries from this screen too (just as you can from the invoice page). Managing the descriptions or durations here saves you from having to navigate back to the project "Times" tab.
"Claiming all billables in period" can be too heavy-handed in certain scenarios, so Drum will allow you to be more selective with what's being claimed per claim item with two buttons on each row:
The lighter, button to the left allows you to be very selective about what entries (time or project expenses) that you want to allocate to that particular deliverable.
The second option will "claim all" billable items for that claim item within the progress claim period (just like the "Claim all billables in period" button, just for a single item).
If you select the first, lighter blue option, you'll see a modal window appear where you can select and deselect the time or expenses that you'd like to claim.
Adjusting the amounts being claimed per claim item
Once you're happy that you've allocated the correct time and expenses to the progress claim, it's now time to adjust the budget amount being claimed per item.
To do this, you can either adjust the fixed value for each item in the "Claim Total" column or adjust the percentage being claimed in the "% Total" column.
Note that adjusting either of these options will automatically update the other.
In this example, we've claimed LESS than the internal expenses and time on our first row (perhaps due to a pre-agreed milestone payment or inefficiencies internally), but more that the internal expenses and time on the second item.
Drum will display the financial performance of the progress claim above the claim table. This will clearly show the claim value against the billable time & marked up expense equivalent, assuming that all of these items cannot be claimed.
In this example, we can only claim $2,208 of the $2,400 of billable value in the project during the claim period, so we're seeing some red figures.
Viewing the progress claim document
At any point during the management of your progress claim, you can always preview the progress claim document that will be produced by clicking on the "Preview Claim Document" button beneath the claim table.
This will take you to a "live" version of the progress claim document where you can also optionally download the document as a PDF.
Finalising the claim
You can change the status of a progress claim to "Approved", or any of the alternative statuses by clicking on the status indicator to the top-right of the screen and then selecting the option that you want and clicking on the small blue tick to confirm.
Once approved, a claim can be converted into an invoice where it can be integrated with Xero.
To convert a progress claim to an invoice, click on the "Create Invoice from Claim" button that appears below the claim table once the progress claim has been approved:
You'll then have the ability to select how the claim items should appear in the resulting invoice:
Consolidated into a single line with a quantity of "1" and a value equaling the total of the progress claim, or
Creating a line item per claim item, each with a quantity of "1" and a value equaling the amount being claimed for that item.
Choose an option that suits you best and then click on the "Save and View Invoice" button.
You'll then be forwarded to the invoice page.
Drum will automatically bring across the progress claim document from the progress claim that you created and will populate the line items as per your selection in the previous screen.
💡 Drum will restrict the editing of invoice line items when creating from a progress claim. This is to help prevent the invoice values from changing accidentally from the claim.
At this point, you can manage the invoice as you normally would, you can:
Upload additional documents to the invoice (e.g. time and cost reports)
Set finance accounts and tax rates
Set issued dates and due dates
Change internal statuses
And finally, integrate with Xero!
Migrating existing projects from direct invoicing to progress claims
There are scenarios where you may want to start using Drum's progress claim system in a project that is already in progress. This is completely fine, but will require a "placeholder" historical progress claim.
In this scenario, you should:
Create a new progress claim in the project with an "Issued Date" prior to today's date (e.g. the last time an invoice was sent).
Populate the claim with the TOTAL claimed value per claim item to date.
Change the claim status to approved.
At this point, do not create an associated invoice, simply leave that approved claim as a historical reference of all value claimed historically.
The next time you create a progress claim in that account, the "Previously Claimed" columns will simply refer to your placeholder claim and therefore be accurate!