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Accounting information is valuable for any company, and is often considered the lifeblood of a business. But looking at business operations alone may not be a sufficient means by which to determine success.
An optimal means of assessing or measuring a business is needed in a manner that provides different dimensions for work done. The Accounts feature in our Tempo Timesheets add-on for JIRA offers businesses the option to break down every business operation to account for every dollar earned and spent to achieve their results. This feature was specifically created with the means to map Tempo to an external accounting system in mind.
Tempo Timesheets provides users with the ability to create accounts and map them to the appropriate customers, and also to map projects and issues within these accounts. Users can report not only on the customers and accounts, but also on teams, users, and on advanced sets of criteria. Our gadget feature enable teams to visualize business data, including the value and distribution of account data. Tempo data can then be printed, exported to Excel or PDF, or to an external API billing system.
Pre-Invoicing
Tempo’s Accounts feature is a pre-invoicing module that collects the details of logged work by employees on JIRA issues through Tempo Timesheets. It has many sub-elements of detail:
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Customer – this can be the name of a client or a common entity of your definition
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Category – a way to create a division for the account / customer, like Development or Marketing
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Account Lead – the responsible party in-house for the account, which needs to be a JIRA user
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Global Account – if set the account is included in every JIRA project
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Monthly Budget – how much time can be spent on an account during a particular period
How you opt to proceed with the data collected by Tempo Timesheets’ Accounts feature really depends on the size and type of your business. Perhaps the reporting possibilities in Tempo Timesheets is enough, where you can assemble reports by:
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Tempo User, Account Key => This provides totals by employee, which allows you manage your teams
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Account Key, Tempo User => This setup of a report provides an easy way to view invoicing information for non-billable time, as well as totals for each project / customer
Larger and more complex businesses will most likely want to integrate with an external accounting / invoicing system, where you continue to work with the data collected by Tempo accounting. This is possible through CSV or XML, which eliminates data-entry errors and is therefore more reliable.
Cost Analysis
The screenshot below shows how Tempo Timesheets' Accounts can provide a 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 individual business’ needs, and what you’d need the data for. For instance, in what aspects are you looking to improve your business?
Problem areas where Tempo Accounts can be used to provide a precise collection of data to analyze:
Gadgets
Tempo Timesheets also has a few gadgets in relation to Accounts:
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The Account Custom Budget Burn-up Chart gadget displays the progress for hours worked on an account and allows the user to insert a custom budget and also choose a custom period. This gadget provides great flexibility on how users can visualize data for a given account, and is a great addition for managers/executives to monitor the progress of their accounts, and to plan and allocate their resources accordingly.
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The Account Hours by Customer gadget displays hours worked during a designated period for each account for a selected customer. The available views are: column chart, pie chart and table, and the available periods to choose from are: the current period, previous period, week, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 and year-to-date. This gadget is a great addition for managers/executives to track, plan and allocate their resources.
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The Account Monthly Budget Burn-up Chart gadget displays the progress for hours worked on an account and its monthly budget. The chart also includes an estimation line that shows a forecast of how the progress might be later in the period and when the budget is reached. The estimation line can be turned off. Available periods with this gadget are current and prior. This gadget is a great addition for managers/executives to plan, allocate and monitor resources and account budget projections.
Tempo Reports
Each type of Tempo Timesheet, can also be viewed and searched in Report mode. These Tempo reports are simple, e.g. they can only focus on sub-sets (one account or a certain filter) of the data available in the system. However, they can be exported to Excel for more dynamic reporting and analysis. This blog post describes how to extract a more robust Tempo report using high-level permissions api export, which can be updated daily. And this blog post walks you through the steps of creating Excel exports of Tempo reports using limited permissions (accessible by all users) with custom data.
In addition, Tempo Timesheets account data can also be printed or exported to PDF, or exported using an external business solution.
Exporting Tempo Data into an External Tool
To do robust cost analysis, you may want to integrate Tempo Timesheets with your business solution. Our Tempo API Guide also explains in more detail the services available for integration. Integration is very important for most companies, as JIRA does not provide an accounting system, an essential component for tracking expenditures like sick days and holidays.
