Tempo Timesheets Tip Of The Month: Customer Invoicing

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All businesses need to sustain customers in order to remain afloat and generate profits. For many of our Tempo Timesheets users, customer invoicing is an integral part of their business. Tempo Timesheets offers a simple way of helping with customer invoicing by enabling users to gather and export their JIRA and Tempo Timesheets data. Here’s how:

To understand how Tempo Timesheets can help with your customer invoicing, you’ll need to understand how our Accounts functionality works. Accounting information is valuable for many companies and is often called the lifeblood of their business. However, looking at business operations alone may not be enough to determine success. A good way to assess or measure the business is needed, a way that provides different dimensions for work done.

Tempo Accounts offers the ability to break down every business operation to account for every dollar earned and spent to achieve results.  It is a pre-invoicing module that collects the details of logged work by employees on JIRA issues through Tempo Timesheets, and has many sub-elements of detail:

  • Customer – this can be the name of a client or a common entity of your definition
  • Category – a way to create a division for the account/customer, like Development or Marketing
  • Account Lead – the responsible party in-house for the account, which needs to be a JIRA user
  • Global Account – if set the account is included in every JIRA project
  • Monthly Budget – how much time can be spent on an account during a particular period

To initially set up Tempo Accounts, a Tempo Administrator will need configure the Account Manager to best map your customer Accounts with JIRA projects. The Account Manager can be configured both manually and by importing the data. (Setting up the Account Manager is described in our documentation.)

For instance, you can assign many Accounts to one JIRA Project or one Account can be assigned to many JIRA Projects. Each Account has the attribute customer, and a customer can have many Accounts. Another attribute is category, so the Account/customer can be divided into something like Development or Marketing, for example. It’s possible to have Accounts mapped to JIRA Projects, but it’s actually also possible to have them as Worklog Attributes. This gives another dimension — for example, a JIRA issue can have work logged with multiple Accounts. As indicated above, other attributes associated with Accounts include the customer contact name, Account lead name, global Account, and monthly budget.

Once you’ve decided which dimensions best suit your needs, you’re ready to extract data for invoicing. You have the option to integrate Tempo Timesheets with your accounting system for detailed invoicing, or simply extract data to an Excel spreadsheet. Exporting Tempo Reports is also an option that some customers opt for.

Exporting Tempo Reports

How you’ll want to proceed with the data collected by Tempo Accounts depends on the size and type of your business. Perhaps the reporting possibilities in Tempo Timesheets is enough, where you can assemble reports by:

  • Tempo User, Account Key => Provides totals by employee which lets you manage your teams
  • Account Key, Tempo User => This setup of a report, gives an easily way to see invoicing information for non-billable time as well as totals for each project /customer

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Exporting Data to an External Tool

For bigger or complex business you’ll most likely want to integrate with an external accounting/invoicing system, where you continue to work with the data collected by Tempo Timesheets Accounting. This is possible through CSV or XML, and it eliminates data-entry errors, and is more reliable. The screenshot below shows how Tempo Accounts can provide precise collection of data to analyze profitability, if there are inefficiencies or to contribute to competitiveness, provide management with data and even shareholders. This all depends on your needs — e.g., what do you need the data for, where are looking to improve your business?

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Integration with your accounting system allows for robust reporting and invoicing. A detailed tutorial on this process can be found in this blog post. The Tempo API Guide also explains in more detail the services available for integration.

Exporting Data to an Excel Report

All Tempo Timesheets reports can be exported into Excel for further analysis and for pre-invoicing. You may not want to go through the hassle of integrating Tempo Timesheets with your accounting system, and would prefer to go with a simpler Excel spreadsheet. A robust custom report may be enough for you. This blog describes how to extract a report using high-level permissions API export, which can be updated daily, and this blog post walks you through the steps of how to export Tempo reports using limited permissions (accessible by all users).

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By using Tempo Timesheets for pre-invoicing, you have an accurate time tracking tool that accurately accounts for hours spent working on client matters. This goes a long way in eliminating errors when it comes time to bill customers.

Be sure to check out our other Tempo Timesheets Tips of the Month for more neat features.

TEMPO TIMESHEETS TIPS OF THE MONTH

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