To those of you who bear the responsibility of generating invoices, we share your sentiment and need for having accurate data on time spent for customer projects. After all, we share the of ensuring overall client satisfaction. Here’s our equation:
What do we mean by that? With accurate time tracking data supporting accurate customer invoicing becomes much easier. If you’re interested in learning more, we covered this topic in depth in last week’s post.
Here are three convenient steps to manage your team's hours for more accurate customer invoicing data with Tempo:
#1 Separating billable and non-billable hours
With Tempo Cloud for JIRA, you have the option to keep track of billable versus non-billable hours by setting billable hours distinctively when logging time.
Granting the “Set Billable Hours” permissions to users allows them to log time that is billed to customers alongside the time worked on an issue - see screenshot below.
[callout class="tip"]As a JIRA admin, you can grant this permission separately for each JIRA project. For instance, you can grant this permission to a group of JIRA users working for a client. The “Set Billable hours” permission is granted under the time tracking permissions. [/callout]
When logging time spent on customer issues and projects, you can log more or less hours than it actually took. For instance, if you're on duty and need to log at least 4 hours for each call-out, this would come in handy.
See step #3 for generating reports with billable hours listed up.
#2 Using accounts to further categorize time spent on customer projects
Tempo Accounts is a convenient way to capture high-level information of all work performed across your business.
As a Tempo Account admin, you can create as many accounts as needed and all users can access Accounts from the sidebar to the left, or from the main menu bar by selecting Tempo > Accounts.
You can categorize your accounts depending on the kind of worklogs that are associated with each account, for example, if the worklogs are billable. After you've created your account, you can both link a JIRA project(s) to the account and associate issues created with an account.
In the account overview, you can enter the hourly budget per month and monitor the progress in a dashboard gadget as shown below. You can also see the team timesheet gadget.
You can also choose a customer to link to the account.
[callout class="tip"]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. It's also possible to associate worklogs to an account by using the account work attribute.[/callout]
See step #3 for generating reports filtered by accounts.
[callout class="user"]Working off-site? Easily manage and track time from anytime, anyplace with the Tempo mobile app. Its free for Android and iOS![/callout]
#3 Generate reports and export for easy sharing
You can access the custom reports from the main menu bar by selecting Tempo > Reports. Or click on the ‘Reports’ icon on the Tempo Sidebar on the left, where you can create your own report or work from a template.
The report above shows all issues and worklogs for one month (you can select any period) and lists up worked and billable hours.
Use the ‘Filter by setting’ to control which worklogs are displayed. The ‘Group by setting’ pivots the results of your report into more detail.
Lastly, you can choose to display the report in Grid or List view by toggling the button on the right, giving you more display options and additional issue/worklog information. The total hours logged will always be displayed on your top right.
When you have all the information you need, you can export your report to XLS, CSV, or PDF for easy sharing with stakeholders and customers.
[callout class="tip"]When your report is ready to be exported, it will export the data that is displayed in the report at that time. For instance, it's easy to exclude worked hours if you prefer not sharing it with your customer. See below. Left PDF export includes both worked and billable hours - right PDF export includes only billable hours.[/callout]
Last but not least…
There you have it — three convenient steps to manage your team's hours for more accurate customer invoicing data.
