The company Riada is a market-leading provider of services for Atlassian products in Sweden. It was founded in 2005 in Stockholm and now has 4 offices across the country. With 40+ consultants with broad competence in server operations, product expertise and methodologies, Riada has grown rapidly in recent years.
About a year ago, the team at Riada found they needed to tackle a problem: their invoicing process involved far too much manual work.
As a consultancy firm they need to log, control, and sum up all their billable hours and send invoices to over 100 different customers a month. Riada’s consultants have always reported their time in Jira using Tempo Timesheets, but they hadn’t looked into the possibility of integrating Tempo with their finance system to reduce vulnerability and cut down on work.
Integrating tools with Tempo APIs
With Tempo APIs, customers can build integrations with tools like SAP, Navision, and others. These are open rest APIs that are publicly maintained, both for Tempo’s worklogs and accounts, and they allow you to export into any tool that you want.
For Riada, those tools include Insight and Fortnox. Insight is used to store Riada’s customer database inside of Jira. It includes all the information about customers, which includes hourly rate, invoice data, contract data, and more. Insight is an asset management system made by Riada’s sister company Mindville, which was acquired by Atlassian.
Next, Riada has Fortnox, which is an external cloud-based system with an open API. Riada added an integration between Insight and Fortnox.
“Before this change, our invoicing process was very slow, because it was done manually,” said Therese Lindepil, Head of Consultants at Riada. “I simply exported the billable hours from Tempo per account and after that I found the hourly rate inside Insight per customer, and in our final system I created the invoices based on the information that I had collected.”
“Now these stages are not necessary anymore, because we have the integration between Insight and Fortnox,” she added.
Here is a view of Fortnox:
How it works
Each of Riada’s customer assignments is associated with its own Jira issue. Individual worklogs are assigned to different Tempo accounts, which are a special feature used to track time across multiple teams and multiple projects. By connecting accounts to specific projects and setting the account in the Issue view, worklogs can be assigned to accounts to provide data for reporting and bookkeeping.
In fact, Riada uses many features in Tempo Timesheets to get more granular data, not just accounts.
“We use Tempo Timesheets to extend the worklog functionality, which allows us to capture extra attributes, like whether the hour is billable or not,” said Mats Karlsson, Atlassian Solution Architect at Riada.
“We also use Tempo reports to approve all the consultants’ time at the end of the month before we start the billing,” Karlsson added.
So when each month is over and all of Riada’s stats have been logged, the team will go into Fortnox and set the run attribute on the create invoice object. This will start the process of fetching all logged time and build a structure of invoices that is then sent to Fortnox using their rest API. The integration always creates an invoice for the previous month and enters the last day of the previous month as the invoice date.
“There were so many things previously that I entered manually, but thanks to the script, this is now done automatically,” Therese explains. “When I run this, I can have multiple invoices created in less than 5 minutes. Before, it took me more than one full day to do this.”
Before the integration between Insight and Fortnox, Riada’s invoicing process was very slow because it was done manually. Today, they can save hours and hours of work each month by pulling data from Tempo Timesheets, and have confidence that the final invoices are accurate.
For more on Riada's story, see our webinar recording:
