Magebit handles their billing with Timesheets
Tempo Team
Before he decided to open his own business in 2014, Arturs Kruze was a developer at an agency for Magento, one of the world’s most popular e-commerce platforms that handles more than $100 billion in gross merchandise volume every year.
Today, Kruze is the co-founder and CEO of Magebit, his own company that supports, develops, and maintains Magento websites. Magebit has grown from a local e-commerce development agency to a global full-service agency with certified experts. The company has clients from 23 countries including the US, Canada, Thailand, Japan and Australia.
However, when Magebit was founded, the company found itself in need of a time tracking and project management solution. Kruze was particularly looking for a tool to measure billable hours and keep track of hours logged.
The simple solution can still be five stars
Tempo Timesheets was an easy choice for Magebit.
“In the previous company before I started my own, I also worked with Jira and Tempo,” Kruze explains. “It worked well so we immediately went with Timesheets.”
Magebit’s 40 employees use Jira for task management. They have different clients with projects and websites to manage, and they submit the tasks via Jira Service Desk. Based on that the employees complete the tasks and log the time spent on those tasks.
Magebit developers log their time spent on tickets and export all of those hours. Then the accounting department assigns clients to all the tickets and based on the hours in each project, they invoice the client.
Another way they use Tempo is for project managers to see how many billable hours a particular developer has. Logging work with Tempo is fast, so Magebit employees can focus on doing the work that adds value.
“It’s quite easy to see how many billable hours are involved,” said Kruze. “We don’t have any API integration or anything like that. The basic functionality we use is good.”
Results
As far as features, Kruze particularly likes the start/stop timer, which works like a stopwatch on issues in Jira and keeps track of the time you spend working on them. Once you start working on an issue, you simply start the tracker and stop it when you are done. The tracker then pre-populates the log work form with the time spent, making it easy to enter your time accurately.
Kruze also highlights that they have the option to generate reports based on custom JQL filters. Initially, they tried other methods also, including built-in Jira reports.
“The export functionality is just not that good in other systems we used,” Kruze says.
Would Kruze recommend Tempo to other companies?
“Yes, definitely,” Kruze says. “It’s a great tool which is very modern. Tempo definitely has some good designers and user experience specialists. All of the other good solutions for time logging are lacking the user experience.”
“For project managers, it gathers good insights on how the team is actually performing,” he continues. “And employees like that it’s well thought-out and easy to use.”