How to gather information in jira for a billing app

[Ziga Zvan]

Dear All,
I'm quite new in a role as a Jira admin and I would appreciate some general guidance in the following use case. Curently we are using Jira, Confluence, JSM, Tempo (timesheets and planner).

1. Our customers will open tickets on a JSM portal

2. I would like to provide some context to this tickets (eg. their test/production environment url). I guess I should link somehow organization in JSD project with an JSM CMDB object customer and provide some custom fields (e.g filter just environments for a particular customer on a issue they enter). Is this possible? Any documentation how to do it?

3. This tickets will be resolved either directly on JSD project or linked to various backend Jira projects. I would like to track the amount of time consumed for a particular customer, know how much of this time is billable and have control over actual hours to bill (eg. consumed time is just a suggestion, operator is able to adjust actual hours beeing billed). I guess Tempo account comes in play at this point. Is this correct direction? Is there a way to link/sync... organizations in JSM with a tempo account? What happens with a time consumed on a ticket in a backend Jira project that is billable and linked to eg. 20 different JSD tickets?

4. I would like to collect this information and generate an invoice in external application using Rest API. Something like this:
For all customers
select hour, ticket_id
from ?
where billable=true and status=ConfirmedByCustomer and month=thismonth
How to do this?

Any guidence will be appreciated. I hope I plan to use correct plugins to achive this tasks...

Regards,
Ziga

[Nigel Rochford]

It's only a partial solution, but if you are seeking an app to capture more information about your customers (at the organisation level) and then present this in context within issues, our app might be useful for you?

Please check it out and let us know your thoughts!

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1222515/crumbs-simple-crm-for-jira-and-jsm

[Anton Skorniakov]

Hi, @Ziga Zvan!

2. Since JSM uses the same issue entity as Jira Software, you can do the same customization — create custom fields of any type, mark them mandatory, etc. So that will allow you to gather context for your tickets. You can read Jira documentation of how to create customer issue fields.

3. Tempo Timesheets is a very good tool to control time tracking in your organization. So it will definitely help you. But, as I know, you can not link JSM organizations to Tempo accounts. And that is not a problem, since I suggest you use the Clerk Invoices app for Jira to deal with invoicing. With this app you can create invoices based on very custom time filtration logic and mix different time filters in one invoice — you can pull time from JSM for a specific organization, plus you can pull time from Jira Software for a specific Tempo account. Or filter time by any issue field, including custom issue fields or statuses. And good point is that Clerk Invoices allows you to automate this process — it allows generating invoices for all your clients with just one click.

I'm the developer of this app, so I would be happy to make a demo for you including other points that you have mentioned in your questions. You can contact me at anton@helloclerk.io. or write me in chat at https://helloclerk.io.

4. Clerk Invoices can automatically export invoices to QBO and Xero. Plus you can bulk export to CSV/PDF for further importing into any other system. And, of course, it has the API to get or build invoices with it.

Let me know if you will have any questions!

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Ziga Zvan

I can't guide you how to setup this up based, simply on the requirements you are stating.

There are many ways, with or with Apps from the marketplace or even no ways to achieve this.

It all depends on you current setup and research will need to be done on how you currently you JSM in conjunction with other App's

If you are on JSM Cloud premium you will have Insight as a CMDB option.

But for designing and configuring the solution you might need to partner up with one the Atlassian Consultancy partners.

This to look at your current setup and the new requirements you have and how to implement these, if possible.

A partner can be found via https://partnerdirectory.atlassian.com/ , here you are able to find a partner in you region.

This reply is not that I'm not willing to help you out, but it is difficult to just state that you would have to this or that.

Best regards,

Marc

P.S. I'm not working for a partner. Just another Jira Admin.
The use case and desired outcome is different for each business.

[Ziga Zvan]

Thx Marc.
I know it is a complex question, however we are an IT sw development company and plan to do it with our own resources. I just need some tips from experienced admins to know which tools to use. I do not want to end up with multiple plugins that do not work with each other.

E.g Is Tempo plugin the way to go regarding billing?

[Ziga Zvan]

We use JSM premium, have tested Insight app. 6 months ago. I had some issues with displaying custom objects from Insight on JSD project. I noticed at that time that JSM is work in progress, a lot of things yet to happen and different from on-prem Insight...

I suppose the situation has changed in last months...

[Sergei Gridnevskii]

2. Custom fields work fine in JSM, just create them as usual and add to portal form. I also recommend using contexts for custom fields, e.g. for one project and issue type selection can contain one set of values, while for another combination - the other.

3. I have no idea what Tempo is but any issue in Jira can have work log records. The other thing that most developers do not like to log time, but if you pay them for logged work only they will do that.

4. Yes it is possible, Jira has REST API. You create filters and then call them using REST API that returns JSON with issue fields for all filtered issues.

[Ziga Zvan]

thx Sergei