Tempo Timesheets helps software, IT services, and business teams track time for accounting, payroll, and client billing, gaining enhanced efficiency and the ability to better forecast the utilization of future team resources.
Professional service teams offering customized, knowledge-based services to their clients spanning a variety of industries - including software consultancy, engineering teams, IT services teams, and professional creative teams - use JIRA for task, release, and project management. Tempo Timesheets seamlessly integrates with JIRA to provide easy and flexible ways to log work, with integrated billing support, timesheet and account approvals, and exportable reports for managers to gain quick overviews of account budgets, team utilization, and performance.
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.
The person who serves as a liaison between a company and its customers - typically an account manager or project manager - is the person responsible for ensuring excellent customer service and client satisfaction.
Gain real-time visibility and value tracking in JIRA
JIRA helps teams plan and organize tasks and issues, assign work, and help teams get work done. Businesses that offer customized, knowledge-based client services are profitable when they bill clients, and tracking time is a central tenet to ensure that customers are accurately billed. Accurate time tracking is critical to ensure accurate billing and customer satisfaction.
Tempo Timesheets is a robust, yet flexible resource management solution that offers seamless time tracking and reporting directly within JIRA, making it simple and easy to allocate time to the right people, projects, and tasks.
It’s important to ensure that team members are productive and accurately tracking their time so that client billing is accurate. If teams and projects aren’t sufficiently staffed, it can negatively impact client satisfaction and your bottom line. Manage employee time for resource management with Tempo Timesheets.
To manage all customers and accounts, you need a centralized overview to easily view account statuses and types, people involved, teams, customer price tables, and JIRA projects. Tempo Accounts is a system plugin, which carries across Tempo Timesheets and Tempo Budgets products, providing a convenient way to capture high-level information of all work performed across your business.
Below is a screenshot of how Tempo’s Accounts overview displays all customer accounts centrally.
If your largest clients have several ongoing projects, it's more manageable to divide projects by accounts and give each account a descriptive name — for instance, Service Contract, Charity Marathon, or Web Development.
Larger organizations can use our REST API to integrate with their ERP or accounting systems. Account timesheet data, including billable hours, is also manually exportable to include with client invoices. Tempo’s Accounts features also provide an efficient way to manage and categorize different types of organizational work activities and cost centers across your business, including CAPEX and OPEX, in addition to billable time.
Set custom price rates based on team role and expertise
Before you can start tracking monetary value in real-time, the person with the manage rate permission needs to set price rates based on team roles and levels of expertise. With Tempo Timesheets, you can create customizable price tables that best suit your customer needs.
You can easily create new price tables, modify hourly rates in existing price tables, and choose the relevant currency. Price tables can also be easily deleted, but you’ll always have a default price table to fall back on that cannot be deleted.
Each account has its own price table configuration, which enables account managers to switch from one price table to another. If no price table is chosen, the Tempo default price table applies to your account. Custom discount rates can also be applied to price tables — for instance, for your most loyal customers. When applied to an account, the discounted rates will display next to the original hourly rates and are used when calculating the revenue report and time and expenses report (see below).
Accurate timesheet reports for customers
Tempo Timesheets offers a variety of reports for teams, issues, accounts, projects, or custom filters. With easy and accurate time tracking at its core, you can get the information you need, when you need it to make informed decisions and share information with your customers at the close of every billing period or as requested. All reports can be saved as PDF, printed, or exported to Excel for further analysis.
Ensure all logged hours are associated with customer accounts
Tempo Timesheets enables you to log work performed for clients, collecting all worklog data associated with customer accounts, and summarizing the total number of hours logged on all JIRA issues.
Before finalizing your client invoices you’ll need to ensure that all hours logged are accounted for and associated with your customer account. Tempo Timesheets will notify you if there are any hours logged to JIRA issues that are not associated to an account and lets you quickly match the appropriate accounts for unresolved issues, as shown below. Once you've sorted through the hours that are unaccounted for, you're ready to proceed.
Measure account performance and manage expenses with the revenue report
As your team is working on delivering your customer projects, you can monitor account revenue and performance to ensure that you're on track and not heading under your target goals or over budget.
Tempo Timesheets also allows your team members to log expenses directly in your JIRA issues.
Various expenses can occur every day, affecting your revenue targets. Expenses can include the lunch meeting from yesterday or travel expenses.
When an expense is logged, it will appear in the expense section of the JIRA issue view. You can see the date on which an expense was logged, a description of the expense, an expense category, the JIRA user who logged the expense and the amount, as shown below. All expenses logged to issues part of an JIRA project and the account are displayed in the revenue report.
For a better control of which categories are available for adding expense, Expense categories are configured in the Manage Categories.
Manage customer accounts and billing
It's time to bill your customers at the close of your time period (typically, at the end of the month). Tempo Timesheets can help you generate time and expenses reports to include along with your invoices. First, you’ll need to approve the account timesheet and close the period to make sure that team members can't go back and change or edit any worklogs.
Print or export the time and expense reports to share with your customers, which include all hours worked on issues, the date and description of the work performed, the name of the team member, hourly price, number of hours, and the total amount of billed work, as well as any associated expenses collected in JIRA.
Managing customer work directly within JIRA gives you more time to focus on generating value to your clients and growing your business.
Learn more about Tempo Timesheets by reading our guide:
