Today, we are excited to announce our largest release to date, Tempo Timesheets 8.0!
In this release, we are extending our time tracking and reporting solution for all teams using Atlassian’s JIRA with team utilization reporting, more accurate accounting and expense reports, custom price tables, enhanced billing support for teams working with customers, and improvements to the worklog calendar and timesheet approval process.
We’re also celebrating a new mobile app release for Tempo Timesheets users, which includes Office 365 calendar integration so users can quickly convert calendar events into time logged on JIRA issues.
Tempo Books joins forces with Tempo Timesheets
Tempo Timesheets is intended to help software teams, IT, service desk, and business teams better understand how they’re spending time on particular tasks for more accurate planning, forecasting, and more visibility over their tasks initiatives. This release is extra special as Tempo Books is joining forces with Tempo Timesheets, our time tracking and reporting features for all JIRA teams.
Effective today, Tempo Books will no longer be available for purchase and the combined products are being released as Tempo Timesheets 8.0.
As many of Tempo Books features benefit project teams in addition to professional services teams, the enhanced product will provide all project teams and managers with better visibility over organizational efforts, enabling businesses to better manage time spent for accounting purposes, payroll, insights into the business revenue cycle, and further billing support with customer reports through a single, focused solution.
Team utilization reporting as a key performance metric
Utilization rates give businesses important information on how and where their resources are being used, and can provide insights into overall effectiveness, productivity, and efficiency of teams and every organization. With the added team utilization reporting features, managers can quickly know how team time spent translates into capital expenses, operational expenses, R&D, billable time, or non-work efforts like vacation days. The team utilization is shown below. You can toggle between weeks or team members and select to display the utilization in hours or percentages.
Achieve more accurate and transparent accounting
Tempo Timesheets’ account feature provides a way to better manage and categorize different types of organizational work activities and cost centers across your business. You can link JIRA projects and issues to distinct accounts, for example, marketing or cloud OPEX, and gain better visibility of all activities and work performed for these different cost centers.
If your JIRA projects and issues aren't associated to an account but, your team is logging work on those issues, Tempo Timesheets will now notify you about any hours that are unaccounted for, and advises you to associate all logged hours to your accounts (or cost center). This new feature is also valuable when working with clients, as every accurate worklog is important. Before you finalize billing your clients, you’ll need to ensure that all billable hours are accounted for and associated with the right customer account.
[callout class="user"] The project / product / account manager and a team have one common goal: to carry out the work required on time to meet the team’s objectives. A standard project typically has four major phases: initiation, planning, implementation, and closure. Use Tempo Timesheets to identify trends and plan future projects. [/callout]
Set hourly rates with custom price tables
Tempo Timesheets now offers custom price tables where you can set different hourly price rates for team roles, for instance a developer or a designer. Each account can have its own price table or a shared price table. Report on how cost is divided between your team members’ logged hours.
If you're a professional services team working with clients, you can create a price table and link it with specific customer accounts. As teams log their time on JIRA issues, Tempo Timesheets translates worklog data into monetary value according to the rates set in the new custom price tables. For each price table linked to an account, custom discount rates can be applied, for instance, if a customer drives a hard bargain.
Time tracking and reporting features for all JIRA teams and get detailed reports of expenses, revenue, and cost centers
Expense management in Tempo Timesheets
Team members can now log expenses in Tempo Timesheets. Expenses are logged directly in JIRA issues and are associated with JIRA projects and customer accounts, if applicable.
All expenses logged are displayed in a special section in a JIRA issue view.
All expenses are categorized, which can easily be customized, for instance, for food, travel, or equipment.
Revenue report in Tempo Timesheets
With Tempo Timesheets 8.0’s revenue report, you can monitor how your accounts are performing after setting your revenue targets for each of them.
The screenshot above shows the calculated revenue for one month at a time. You can set the total revenue target for the account, and monitor progress as a project gets underway, quickly knowing whether actual revenue is under or over your targets. All hours logged on JIRA issues, hourly rates, and expenses logged for the account are included in this report.
In this use case, we’ll explore how Tempo Timesheets can help account managers successfully manage customer accounts in JIRA, deliver projects on time and within budget, and save time on billing. Manage customer accounts with Tempo Timesheets and JIRA.
Time and expense report
With the time and expense report added to Tempo Timesheets, you can roll up all relevant data associated with an account for a particular time period. When invoicing your customers, you can easily access the data you need to share with your customers, including all work performed, detailed worklog data, applicable price rates, and all expenses logged to JIRA issues.
Worklog calendar and timesheet approval improvements
We are happy to introduce a highly requested feature to the worklog calendar, which enables users to submit their timesheet directly from this view, if the timesheet approval process has been enabled by a Tempo admin. At the close of a period, the button above a user’s worklog calendar converts to a “Submit Current / Last month Timesheet,”, when a timesheet is ready for a supervisor’s approval.
The worklog calendar also displays the status of the current time period where users can easily determine whether they are ahead or behind on their required hours for the period (see below).
We’ve also added a pending timesheet notification so team leads are notified in-product if they have team member timesheets that are awaiting their approval — another highly requested feature. This is particularly helpful to managers that lead multiple teams or if your team is large and distributed. The screenshot below shows the in-product notification that appears when next accessing Tempo Timesheets.
Will all Tempo Timesheets 8.0 features be available for JIRA Cloud? Tempo Timesheets 8.0 will not initially be available for the cloud. Tempo will launch a next generation of cloud products for Atlassian’s JIRA Connect technology over the upcoming months, which will include Tempo Timesheets and other Tempo product solutions.
Office 365 calendar integration for mobile app; additional enhancements
We have released Tempo mobile 1.2, our free mobile for Tempo Timesheets users that is available for iOS and Android. One of the app's most popular features (and which we at Tempo love) is the ability to convert calendar events into worklogs. Now we're introducing Office 365 Calendar integration in addition to Google calendar integration, where users can quickly convert Office 365 calendar events into registered worklogs in JIRA.
The new release also supports 3D touch for iPhone 6S/6S Plus, users can use 3D touch to quickly create trackers and worklogs. Our mobile team has been working hard on improvements, feature requests, and support for additional devices.
