Pre bought support hours - logging against allocated hours

Andrew Wardlaw May 3, 2017

Hi,

We have clients who buy blocks of support hours from us (for example 100 hours to be used as and when required).

I am looking for a way, either natively or through add-on to say that client "X" has 100 hours against them and as we log time on tickets in service desk it reduces the number of hours left.

Each client has a project setup for thier support contract so effectively a Project has a number of hours left.

We currently already use Tempo timesheets

Thanks

5 comments

Fathi Al-Kamil January 24, 2018

Hi Andrew,

I have a similar feature that I would like to implement. May I know if you have found a solution to this? Would greatly appreciate your help.

 

Thank you

Jack Brickey
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
January 24, 2018

So here is an option for you to consider. It may or may not meet your needs.

  1. For each customer pre-paid hours package create a Task with a summary something like - "Customer A - January 2018 = 100h"
  2. Set the Original Estimate to the #hours purchased in the Task. Note: you will need to enable Time tracking for the project.
  3. For each incident for the customer create a sub-task under the parent task and add all of the normal details processing to closure.
  4. Every time an agent works on an incident (sub-task) they Log work on the parent
  5. Optional: Define a filter that will send an alert email when the remaining estimate is getting low, e.g. - project = ABC and issuetype = task and remainingEstimate <= 10h. You can set up a subscription on this saved filter to notify when not empty. You could  have one filter per customer or combine.

Hope this is useful.

Like Zac Salazar likes this
Samuel Lee January 24, 2018

Hi Jack,

Just a few notes on the solution you recommended;

1) The first and second step work just fine in tracking the number of hours a customer has. I have tried this method including using a subscription to alert me when the reminingEstimate is nearing 0h.

2) An incident created under this parent issue can only be classified as a Sub-Task issue type. That means that my reports would indicate a lot of sub-tasks being reported by customers instead of the actual issue type (e.g. Query becomes sub-task, Report an Incident becomes sub-task)

3) I would still require time tracking on the individual sub-tasks however, an Original Estimate is required when a sub-task is created. What happens then is that the value put in the Original Estimate for the sub-task gets added to the Original Estimate value of the parent task. (E.g. Original estimate of parent task becomes 105h instead of the initial 100h when 5h of Original Estimate is added to the sub-task.)

4) Logging of hours to the parent task would help track the total hours used from the parent task but that would not help indicate the remainingEstimate in the sub-task.

 

Although it didn't solve my requirement but thank you nonetheless. I will continue trying more solutions.

Fathi Al-Kamil January 24, 2018

You are right, Samuel. Adding an original estimate to the sub-task does also add to the parent task's original estimate. That makes it weird for the time tracking of the sub-task. Also, I wouldn't want my report to have all issues reported to be sub-tasks either. Thank you for pointing that out.

 

I tried creating a separate issue and then logging my hours in that issue. I would then log my hours into the task called "Customer A - January 2018 = 100h" as jack suggested. That way, my customer's issue can have the time-tracking in the indvidual issue and his pre-paid hours are also deducted from the task issue. The only problem is that my timesheet would show double hours logged just to attend to the same issue.

Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
January 25, 2018

Hi Andrew,

In our organization we too sell blocks of time to our customers.  The easiest way for us to manage was to use Tempo.  It has built in Accounts that we use to track time that is billable vs support.  We use reporting to track down the burnrate as well have used the tempo api to extract the billable time and upload it into Salesforce where it was originally sold.

Just a different take on the above ideas which are very good as well.

Susan

Tim Patrick January 25, 2018

Totally agree with Susan.

We use the budget hours on Tempo and it is very effective. If you use the Tempo accounts, it makes life a lot easier.

And from my understanding, if you have Tempo timesheets, you should have the accounts and budgets. This can also be represented through gadgets on the dashboards.

And no, i dont work for them :-)

Eduardo Oliveira
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
July 22, 2021

Hi @Andrew Wardlaw - Not sure if this is still a need for you but here is a great option to tackle this challenge: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1221714/contractspro-managed-services-solution?tab=overview

 

If you still need any help, let me know. 

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