In 2014, Tempo introduced Tempo Accounts as a system plugin where Accounts was redesigned to manage project portfolios in JIRA and make it available for other add-ons. Before, the Account Manager was a feature in Tempo Timesheets. Tempo Accounts is the link between JIRA issues and external systems and is great to group issues from multiple JIRA projects under a common entity.
To get you started with Tempo Books and fully exploit the features, this tip is about how you should configure your accounts to get the most accurate information about time spent on each issue and account for customer billing. Plus, you can pivot the information to explore what type of work your team and team members are working on.
The image above depicts how Tempo Accounts is set up. One account can be linked to many JIRA projects and customers can have many accounts. Account categories are used to classify the account data, i.e. explaining what kind of an account it is. Here is the documentation for setting up accounts and linking them to JIRA projects, Issues, and worklogs.
Tempo Accounts in Tempo Books
When developing Tempo Books as a professional services solution, it was clear that Accounts needed a further classification to filter the time logged and determine whether it was billable or non-billable e.g. capitalized, internal, or operational. A big part of selling service and catering to clients is the time spent on each task for billing and invoicing.
Time spent on tasks and issues, both billable and non-billable, is a cost to your business. As a consequence, it also affects how prices are set across teams and roles. Accounts are clarified by categories for a better grouping of their data. Account categories are a great way to create sections internally, e.g. Development or Marketing, and to differentiate customers’ different needs, e.g. website improvements or software maintenance. In Tempo Books, the type of an account category is a higher-level categorization of what kind of data the account is made up of, solely for data grouping in the Team Utilization report. Therefore, account category types can further analyze the data to see how much time spent on issues and projects are billable.
Account Configuration in Tempo Books
Let’s take a closer look at the account configuration. The Tempo Account Navigator is accessible from the Tempo drop-down menu. From there, it is possible to configure accounts categories and category types.
The Tempo Account Navigator view allows you to create new accounts and search for all accounts in the system. When creating a new account, the category is chosen or a new category is created. It is also possible to import an account and choose the account category upon import. If an account is undefined i.e. is not categorized, the category is chosen in the account’s configuration.
From the Account Navigator view, account categories are further managed. To make fully use of the utilization reports, account categories have to be classified into types as mentioned above. Tempo Books offers four different default types:
- Billable
- Capitalized
- Internal
- Operational
This classification of types is important to show how time spent and logged is divided between them; important for the value of the Utilization report. As seen below.
