JIRA + Tempo, how to use it for billing

Question

Hey,

We're in the process of switching to JIRA from our old project management system and the development team is loving it, but our accounts manager hates it.

I'm struggling to figure out how to get JIRA/Tempo to easily track billed and not billed work logs and run reports.

I'm not sure if I need to be asking this question within Tempo, JIRA or if there's another way to achieve this.

I've come close to getting this to work by using a combination of custom worklog attributes and filters, but the problem is we can't filter report views by worklog attributes, making the system unusable for what we need.

The requirements are fairly simple and our previous system could manage this easily:

* Every two weeks, we need to run a report accross all projects to see which time logs have not been billed yet
* Daily reports on a per customer basis to find out what time has been spent for a particular customer

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

Scott.

Patrick van der Rijst · Answer

Actually Tempo Books is about to come out, that is the missing link for actually billing it.

Scott Salisbury · Answer

Hi Susanne,

Thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately, our need for filtering is more about bulk editing and easily updating multiple timelogs of a certain filter, rather than data interpretation, otherwise we would have no issue in using Excel for manipulating data.

Ideally, what we would like to see is the ability to filter by an attribute such as billed=false, and then be able to bulk edit all timelogs to billed=true, via a "check all" link or similar.

I've attached a mockup in an attempt to describe how I envisage this. It's more about bulk editing the result set of a filter for quicker management of timelog data.

Our current activeCollab system allows us to do this very easily.

It's starting to look like we may have to abandon the idea of moving our development team to JIRA due to these billing and accounting difficulties. It's starting to become more hassle than it's worth.

The point of moving to JIRA was to improve efficiency and not to make life harder for our account manager who insists we stay with our existing "not broken, don't fix it" system.

An argument we don't seem to be winning and is causing much internal tension

Thanks again,
Scott.

mockup.png

Susanne Götz [T1 · Answer

Hi Scott,

It is not possible to filter by worklog attributes in JIRA or Tempo, but it can be done after an export to Excel. When you export a Timesheet to Excel, you can pivot the table to show only the data you are interested in and filter it. Please take a look at http://blog.tempoplugin.com/2012/pivoting-tempo-and-jira-reports-using-excel/ for more information.

Kind regards,

Susanne (Tempo)