If a progress claim starts with re-typing figures, you are doing the job twice and trusting it half as much. Claim stage by stage instead.
Progress claim day has a distinctive feel in a lot of service businesses. Someone opens the contract, opens the job, opens a spreadsheet, and starts reconstructing how much of the work is done. The percentages are estimates of estimates. The figures get typed into an invoice by hand. And once it is out the door, nobody can easily explain how any single number was arrived at.
It works, in the sense that invoices go out. It is also the point where the most margin quietly disappears.
Lump-sum guesses cost twice
A claim built as one lump-sum percentage has two problems. First, it is imprecise: work that is genuinely finished gets under-claimed because the estimate was conservative, and cash sits in the job longer than it needs to. Second, it is unauditable. When a client queries the claim, the only defence is the person who built it remembering their reasoning.
Both problems come from the same source — the claim was calculated somewhere other than where the work is tracked.
Claiming stage by stage
In TSMPlus you claim progress stage by stage. Because stages are real and nested, you can claim against exactly the level of detail the job has: a whole site, a trade within it, or a single sub-task that finished this week.
The invoice then draws from numbers the rest of the system already holds. On a sample project, 35.8% of a $307,800 contract value has been invoiced, and every dollar of that traces back to the stage it was earned on. There is no second calculation to defend, because there was no second calculation.
Per-stage history is the audit trail
The by-product of claiming per stage is a claim history per stage. Six months later, when someone asks why the mechanical stage on building two was claimed at 60% in April, the answer is on the stage rather than in someone’s memory.
That history is also what makes the rest of the reporting honest. Claimed value, remaining value and margin all come off the same records, so the Dashboard, Invoicing and Financial tabs agree without anyone reconciling them.
The test
Take your last progress claim and pick one line. Can you show, in the system, which work that number came from? If the answer involves a spreadsheet or a phone call, the claim was a guess that happened to be roughly right.
We will take one of your live contracts and show you what claiming stage by stage looks like against it.
Every claimed dollar should trace straight back to the stage it was earned on.
See it on your own job.
Bring us your most complicated project and we’ll show you what it looks like in TSMPlus Projects.
