Better way to have story estimate

[Hari Shankar]

I've a small team (We're a startup) of which we've 1 dedicated tester. Currently the flow that we follow is

1. Project Owner creates Epic & Story.
2. Developer completes development and updates the ticket.
3. Tester tests the complete ticket using the same story so the efforts for the story are clocked in same story. If any defect is identified, comment is updated and is passed back to the same developer and the cycle continues.

Advantage of this is that the total effort for a specific task is aggregated and is easier for me to generate report and bill my client. But pain point is, am unable to figure out the efforts that the tester has put in as the total effort of the story is passed on to the ticket assignee (Developer). I did some research around the community and learnt that there are few 3rd party plugins/extensions that can be used to generate the efforts put in by a user to a specific ticket, however these are paid and its difficult for us at this moment to invest for such extensions.

I just wanted to know how this is handled by others in the Jira community.