The Ultimate Guide to Track Billable Hours in Jira for Maximum Profit

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It is imperative to track billable hour for any service-based business, from freelancers to the big agencies. The billable hours help you get paid appropriately while also helping you maintain profitability in your projects. Jira offers a great time tracking features and may become a helpful tool for effective management of billable time.

In this article, you will find out how and why you should track billable hours, what problems may arise during the process, and how to overcome these problems to earn more through better time management.

Why Track Billable Hours?

Capturing hour spent on billable work is important to determine the productivity of your team. It offers helpful information about the percentage of your agency that is billable, or focused on revenue production. Moreover, it helps in deciding the profitability of a project and therefore ensure that it's charged appropriately and becomes a positive contributor to the income of the company.

Common Challenges in Billable Hour Tracking

It is not always easy to track consultant billable hours though. A frequent problem is the distinction between chargeable and non-chargeable activities, particularly in those projects where tasks may intersect.

Inefficient time tracking is a result of manual input errors with the potential of having large discrepancies. These inaccuracies might lead to over billing or underbilling of clients which is damaging to the client relation and the financial planning.

To address these barriers, organizations require proper tracking tools that can easily differentiate between billable and non-billable work.

Top Billable Time Tracker Jira Apps

The choice of the right time tracking software is critical in order to provide correct billing, optimize the use of resources and have a positive work flow. It is immensely important to have proper tool that will help tracking the time spent on a particular case effectively.

Below are the best Jira apps for tracking the time you work on and bill for.

#1. ActivityTimeline

ActivityTimeline is a time and resource management plugin that assists teams to record working hours and manage timelines of different tasks.

The add-on helps the project managers to know whom to assign a project and the amount of time that he or she is likely to work on it. This ensures the primary focus is on those tasks that can be billed.

ActivityTimeline's specific features allow teams to understand what tasks require more attention and what time is wasted on unproductive activities.

#2. Tempo Timesheets

Tempo Timesheets is a single tool that provides all the functionality required for time tracking for teams and companies. It includes real-time reporting, progress tracking, and an ability to work with other project management tools including Jira.

Tempo Timesheets provides an extensive set of features that will help you to always be clear on your billable hours, making it easier for you to track, report, and bill for work time.

#3. Timepiece

Timepiece is an easy-to-use time-tracking tool that helps to create clarity when working with teams and partners. That makes it ideal for organizations that require each member of their team to be aware of the project developments.

With Timepiece, you can categorize time data into issues age, lead time and cycle time to have a clear view of how time is being utilized in your company.

How to Use Billable Hour Tracking to Boost Profitability

Track billable hours to determine which projects are most profitable and least profitable and increase worker efficiency. Let's see how to manage billable hours in Jira with the help of time tracking features of ActivityTimeline.

ActivityTimeline is especially useful for tracking billable hours and managing tasks since you have an easy way to see all the responsibilities and working hours on each project. First of all, you have to define some time tracking settings like maximum number of worklog hours per one day to avoid overloading. Make sure that work categories are available and contain Billable and Non-billable options. It's also possible to include an extra event type called "Overtime" in case one has to work longer than planned.

Having set up time tracking, employees have two ways of entering billable time against the assigned tasks. First is, they can go to their personal workspace, click on "Log time" and add a work log entry marking it as "Billable"; and "Non-Billable".

Another way is to track the time right on the Jira issue using the ActivityTimeline time tracking dialog. Here, the advantage is that it can easily be in synch with the main ActivityTimeline system to capture time properly. Select the “Billable” category and then click “Save”.

Non-Jira related work such as meetings or trainings can also be recorded and managed as work logs. As these tasks are with "Booking" type, make sure there is an option "Treat Booking items as worklogs"; in Timesheets Configuration on to record these activities in the reports. Thus, ActivityTimeline will consider estimated hours from past occurrences as work logs.

If your organization is using timesheet approval, it will be of benefit to the organization to enable the approval workflow of ActivityTimeline. The Timesheet Report enables the approval or rejection of timesheets with the possibility to view entries, confirm billable hours and check the data's correctness before submitting it to create invoices. You can get multiple reporting views to track billable hours spend:

• Progress View is a bird's eye view of the logged hours versus the expected hours.
• The Timeline View presents time entries on a timeline and uses color coding to highlight over- or under-billing.
• The Detailed View offers more specific information on each worklog to include the user, the project, issue and the time spent.

Some Billable Hours Best Practices

No matter what tool you choose, to ensure you’re charging your clients accurately and maximizing profitability, follow best practices for tracking billable hours.

• Set Boundaries Between Billable and Non-Billable Tasks. As a rule, it is necessary to specify which of the activities can be billed and which of them cannot. This minimizes cases of overcharging or undercharging clients to protect the customers.
• Record Time Diligently. For each task that you can charge for, write the total time spent on it and then multiply that by the rate at which you charge per hour. Staying organized in this way also makes it harder to miss any time, which is important.
• Use a Billable Hours Visualization. Reports and charts useful to show the overall billable time for a particular project. It's a perfect way to monitor the number of hours that are worked and that have been worked so that everything is in its place.
• Leverage Time Tracking Tools. Use a time tracker feature of Jira's ActivityTimeline or any other plugin to track time on projects. This minimizes logging in wrong data and offers instant information on where the time was spent.
• Regularly Review and Adjust. It is important that you keep checking the time tracking data from time to time so as to make the necessary corrections. This means that your records will always be up to date and wouldn't misrepresent the amount of work you have done.

Summary

Billable hour tracking is crucial for improving the efficiency of a business. Using Jira add-ons, you can track the time spent on work and calculate the amount of time to be charged from the client. Find the best projects to work on and improve employees' performance to leverage more resources for getting your work done.