Add and manage staff allowances

Create and manage staff allowances

Create staff allowances, allocate them to projects and approve them for your payroll process. Allowances do not integrate with Xero because Drum does not currently connect to payroll.

Key Understanding

It's important to know that Drum has two key concepts for expense claims, an expense claim item and a staff allowance. An expense claim item is an item that could potentially be converted into a bill in your Xero account and is generally used for disbursements when staff have been travelling or for any of their out-of-pocket expenses.

💡 You can find the tutorial on creating Expense Claim Items here: Tutorial: Create and manage Expense Claims & Expense Claim Items

Staff allowances on the other hand are generally paid through payroll and will appear in the detailed timesheet report within your Drum account to ensure that it's captured during your payroll process.

A staff allowance within an expense claim will never be converted to a bill as it's always paid via the payroll process. This is currently managed outside of Drum as a manual process.

Step 1 - Accessing Expense Claims

Click the hamburger menu icon ☰ in the top nav bar
Click on Expenses

💡 If you cannot see the Expenses option then please read Tutorial: Enabling Expense Claims & adding Staff Allowances

There are 2 ways to create an Expense Claim; Manually or by Drag & Dropping a receipt.

Step 2 - Manually creating an Expense Claim

Click + New Expense Claim button

Give your expense claim a Name
Select the Employee who is making the claim
Select an Approver; the staff member who will be approving the expense claim
Click Create Expense Claim to finish

Navigating the Expense Claim screen

Click to edit the Name
You can Delete an expense claim from here
Change the Status e.g. to 'Pending' when awaiting approval
The Xero status control applies to eligible expense claim items only. It does not integrate staff allowances with Xero.
Change the assigned Employee
You can change who will be Approving this expense claim
Add an optional Reference
Add an optional Description
Issue dates are used for expense claim item bills; they do not connect allowances to Xero.
Due dates are used for expense claim item bills; manage allowance payment through your payroll process.
Add an optional Note
Create / Add a new Staff Allowance
Create / Add a new Expense Claim Item
Drag & Drop a receipt to automatically create an Expense Claim Item

Step 3 — Add a staff allowance

Click on the + Add Staff Allowance button
Enter a Staff Allowance Name
Give the allowance a option Reference
Enter an optional Description
Select the appropriate Staff Allowance Type
Enter the required Quantity
Select the appropriate Finance Account
Click Save to continue

Step 4 — Edit a staff allowance

After clicking Save you will see your newly created Expense Claim Allowance.

Editing an Expense Claim Allowance

Change the Name by clicking on the name text
You can change the Description by clicking on the text below the name
Change the Staff Allowance
Change the Quantity here
Change the associated Finance Account
Change the associated Tax Rate

Step 5 - Allocating Expense Claim Allowances to Projects

We can now allocate the newly created Expense Claim Allowance/s to one or more projects.

Search for an existing Project to allocate this expense to
Once a project is selected click here to assign this expense to specific Task within the Project
Select the Cost Type
Allocate a % Percentage of this expense to the project OR
Allocate a $ Value to the project
Add an Additional Project to allocate this expense to
Delete a Project Allocation
An Additional Project

Step 6 - Approving the Expense Claim

Once you have finished creating and allocating expense claim allowances we are ready to approve the Expense Claim.

Change Drum Status to 'Approved' (or 'Pending' if another staff member is in charge of approving expense claims.
You can now see when and who approved the claim here.
Individual Expense Claim Allowances can be marked as 'Paid' here
Or Mark All Paid by clicking here and optionally setting a date