How can we allow for multiple approvers of time in something integrated with JIRA?

[Chris Steiner]

Hello all!  I have a question that is very similar to one that has been asked (and in some cases answered) on this forum, but hopefully my question is different enough to get a different answer. 

We are considering trying to move all of our company’s timekeeping into JIRA to simplify our current process in which employees are required to enter their time into two different systems separately, which is very prone to errors and therefore discrepancies between the systems. 

One of the major obstacles we are encountering is our time approval process.  Our current process requires a matrix of approvals for any given time sheet:

• Any work done on a billable project has to be approved by that project’s manager, and any given developer could be working on several different billable projects in a single week.
• Any work done by a contractor has to be approved. Billable work is approved as mentioned in the bullet above.  Non-billable work is approved by the supervisor or the owner of the non-billable project, depending on how the project is set up.

In our current timekeeping system we also have the ability to assign individuals to projects to control who can post time to a given project, though this is less important to our process than the ability to have multiple approvers for a single time period.

Along with researching this on this forum and elsewhere online, we have also reached out to three vendors of timesheet add-ons (WorklogPro, AIO Reporting & Timesheets, & Tempo Timesheets) to determine if their product has this ability.  Unfortunately none of these supports this, and we have been unable so far to find any kind of a workaround for this.

So, my question to the group is this:  Do you know of any add-on, group of add-ons, or other workaround for having multiple approvers for a single timesheet (based on the scenarios above) in JIRA?  Have you, your company, or someone you know solved this or found a workaround?

We’re also open to solutions that integrate with JIRA that are not add-ons, if anyone has any suggestions for that.

[Darryl Lee]

Ah, as is often the case after asking for help, I figured it out.

Since I'm hacking workflow XML anyways, why not try removing the "Add a comment" post-function there:

<function type="class">
<arg name="class.name">com.atlassian.jira.workflow.function.misc.CreateCommentFunction</arg>
</function>

Hey, that worked. Nice.