As Head of Design for a big service company in Ukraine, Anton Skorniakov couldn’t help but notice that billing customers was a pain. His company used Jira and Tempo Timesheets, but there was no simple tool to integrate with them so that he could send invoices to clients.
“We used spreadsheets, so we created invoices manually. We needed to copy and paste time from Tempo reports into that spreadsheet and manually put the hourly rate for different people,” Skorniakov says.
It wasn’t always so bad. When they originally worked at a flat rate, it was just a question of copying one number, putting it inside the invoice, and applying the flat rate. But then when they started charging different hourly rates depending on the team role, like Senior Designer, it became much more difficult to manage. They had to separate different roles in the reports, manually copy time for every role, apply the hourly rate and remember what rate was used for a specific client.
“So I was faced with a lot of difficulties,” Skorniakov says. “I was surprised that there was no tool that allowed us to send invoices automatically from Jira or Tempo.”
Launching Clerk Invoices
That’s how Skorniakov decided to start Clerk Invoices just one year ago. At the time he knew it was a must to integrate with Tempo Timesheets on top of Jira.
“Tempo is definitely a leader in time tracking for Jira and most service companies use it,” he explains. “That is why we needed to integrate it, because it’s required by our clients.”
How was the experience of integrating with Tempo?
“Most of it went smoothly,” Skorniakov says. “We had some issues with fetching some types of data from Tempo, but I’m active in Tempo’s Slack channel, so I talked with Tempo developers. They usually reply very quickly and help with all the questions I have.”
A look at how Clerk Invoices works
In Clerk, you can create invoices manually or in an automated way.
Manual mode works perfectly when you have small projects with few invoices. Here you can add multiple time and materials invoice items. For which you can set an hourly rate, import time from Jira and Tempo, apply different time filters by Tempo account, project, employee, team role, issue type, etc. You can add fixed price items, taxes and discounts:
But the magic happens when you use the Invoice Generator. With Invoice Generator you can generate dozens of invoices in a few clicks. You don’t even need to know who worked on what. The app will automatically analyze all Jira and Tempo time and build only those invoices that have some work done for selected dates:
Invoice Generator uses invoice templates which can filter Jira time by Tempo account, Jira project, employee, team role, issue type, etc. Here you have centralized team structure management using team schemes and centralized hourly rate management using price lists. This mode works perfectly for bigger companies and provides more automation.
What’s next for Clerk invoices for Jira
So what’s next for Clerk? They’re continuing to build on their integration with Tempo by looking into integrating with worklog attributes, which are custom fields that you can add to time records to record detailed information about logged time. Examples include “overtime” or “travel time”.
“Some clients want to filter time based on worklog attributes,” Skorniakov said. “For example, they use them to tell whether the time was already covered by a retainer. They don’t want to put the time that is covered by a retainer in the invoice and they need only extra time there. So that is why we have put in our backlog to filter by Tempo custom worklog attributes.”
The benefits of Clerk invoicing
Invoicing is a crucial part of running a business. With Clerk and Tempo Timesheets working hand-in-hand, you can create more accurate invoices with reliable data, and save time while you’re at it.
It takes just three clicks to integrate Clerk and Tempo. For better and easier invoicing, take a look.
