Cost tracking + Vacations and Business Trips

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Vacation is a sweet and lovely word. With vacations, productive work is possible. Sooner or later, an employee who does not have a good rest will face apathy, emotional burnout, and procrastination. And this will bring the company more losses than a team member's vacation cost.

Business trips are another expense item. From time to time, it becomes necessary to travel for networking, participate in conferences, sign contracts, and establish relationships with partners. And this is also a financial challenge.

What unites these two concepts? Costs. It's relatively easy to calculate an employee's salary when you have a specific pool of completed tasks and do it according to a standard algorithm - for example, hourly rate*worklogs. But how and where do you enter the cost of paid vacation? Or, for example, how to properly account for business trip expenses for a team or a part of it? 

Let's try to figure it out.

Adding vacations to the cost-tracking tool

Earlier, we introduced you to the Cost Tracker for Jira Cloud app. In our previous articles, we informed you once about implementing cost tracking in your workflows. The Add-on maintains the straightforward principle of calculating the company and project cost.

In one line, it can be written as

People logs * People rates + Direct expenses.

But this formula is not entirely correct if we are talking about vacations. We don't have to rely on workflows, but we have an Expenses tab that will help in this case.

So, if you provide paid vacations to your team members, use the Expenses tab to have this information in the general expense report for the month.

To have the most accurate data, link these expenses to a specific team member who is granted paid leave.

Then, for example, you can make a particular report for the first half of 2023 and see in general "working" expenses and how much money was allocated for paid vacations of your team members.

Accounting for business trip expenses

So, business trips always involve transportation costs, hotel accommodation, meals, etc. And if we are already keeping records in one app, then it is advisable to keep track of such processes and activities in the same directory.

This is similar to the previous instruction, but we can also add to the expenses the cost of paying the secretary or assistant who organized the business trip.

The conditional assistant must create a task and log the time spent organizing the business trip.

All expenses should be entered in the Expenses tab in the Cost Tracker add-on.

Next, go to the Cost Reports tab and generate a general report on business trip expenses.

By adding the Planned budget value when generating a report, you can see if you have exceeded the previously agreed budget.

How to save more on your vacation or business trip workflow? 

Automating your vacation or business trip workflow can significantly reduce the labor costs associated with manual processes such as creating expense issues or managing vacation approvals. With the Business Process Manager (BPM) add-on, you can create templates for these repetitive processes, allowing them to be planned or initiated automatically.

Let's explore how to do it!

Request Submission: When a vacation template is triggered by an employee or starts on a set date, BPM creates an issue with the vacation request form. This form collects essential details like the vacation duration, planned expenses, and the employee's current projects or tasks.

Cost Tracking: As part of the approval process, BPM enables cost tracking by including relevant fields in the request form. For instance, you can include a field for estimating the business trip expenses or request a time tracking report to ensure that the employee has sufficient working hours available for paid leave. This ensures that cost estimates or actual expenses related to the vacation are captured within the submitted form.

Approval Workflow: The vacation request follows a predefined workflow automatically. This workflow typically involves multiple stages of approval, such as the direct manager's initial approval and the department manager's final authorization. Approvers can review the vacation details, including associated costs, before providing their approval.

This approach allows for better tracking and management of vacation costs while ensuring that approvals are obtained in a timely manner.

Instead of conclusion

Therefore, accounting of funds should be everywhere. Vacations and business trips - are all related expenses accompanying the company's work processes. And for completeness, they should also be included in the reporting. We hope Cost Tracker for Jira Cloud will be helpful to you - you have 30 days of the trial to get to know it better. Also, we invite you to book demo session where a SaaSJet representative will happily answer all your questions.

P.S. We invite you to read other articles and use cases from our team: 

• Tracking Project Costs in Jira with Cost Tracker
• The Cost of an Issue in Jira with Cost Tracker
• How to get your team meeting cost in Jira
• How to calculate version cost in Jira
• How to calculate the cost for efforts on JSM issues
• How much does one bug cost
• Cost tracking for marketing teams in Jira
• How much does one epic in Jira cost