💸 How to Automate Invoicing for Contractors & Freelancers From Jira or Tempo Worklogs

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⚡ TL;DR — What You’ll Get

If you work with external contractors or freelancers who log time in Jira, Clerk Invoices for Jira lets you automate the entire invoicing process — from logged hours to ready-to-send invoices.

Here’s what you can do:

• Individual branding and contact details per contractor;

• Support for both hourly billing and fixed-price contracts;

• One-click invoice generation for all your contractors each month;

• Bulk Export to PDF/Excel, or QuickBooks/Xero;

• Optional invoices emailing to your company;

• Export invoices via API for integration with other systems;

🧩 Why This Matters

If your company hires external contractors or freelancers who log their time in Jira, you’ve likely faced the headache of:

• Manually calculating hours worked;

• Tracking different hourly rates;

• Building individual invoices from scratch;

• Collecting and organizing these invoices each month;

With Clerk Invoices, you can automate this entire workflow — at scale.

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🔧 Step-by-Step: Automating Contractor Invoicing

Here’s the overall idea: for each contractor or freelancer, you’ll set up an Invoice Template that defines how their invoice should be generated — including rates, time filters, and branding. At the end of each billing period, you’ll use the Invoice Generator to create all contractor invoices in one click. Once generated, invoices can be automatically synced to QuickBooks or Xero, or bulk exported to PDF or Excel for manual processing or email delivery.

Here’s how to set it all up step by step:

1. 👤 Set Up a “Contractors” Client

Create a new client inside Clerk called “Contractors”. This will be the account that holds all invoices issued by your external team members.

If you're using QuickBooks or Xero, you don't need to create a client manually. Once the integration is enabled, you'll see all your existing contractors from QuickBooks/Xero automatically appear in the Clerk client list — just make sure they’ve already been added in your accounting platform.

2. 🎨 Create an Invoice Layout for Each Contractor

For every contractor or freelancer, create a custom Invoice Layout that:

• Defines the invoice design (colors, logo, formatting),

• Sets the invoice language and locale,

• Most importantly: includes contractor identity info (name, address, bank details, tax ID, etc.)
  — so the invoice is issued from the contractor to your company, not the other way around.

💡 Hint: You can quickly duplicate an existing layout to create versions for each contractor — no need to build each one from scratch.

3. 💰 For Fixed-Price Contractors

If a contractor gets a flat monthly rate (e.g. $2000/month):

• Create an Invoice Template for that person,

• Add a Fixed Price Line (set monthly rate),

• Assign it to the “Contractors” client and the contractor’s Invoice Layout.

• If you're using QuickBooks or Xero, make sure to link the invoice template to the contractor contact that was imported from your accounting system. You don't have “Contractors” client in this case. This ensures the generated invoice will sync to the correct contact in QuickBooks or Xero.

4. ⏱️ For Hourly-Based Contractors

For those paid by the hour, first do this one-time setup:

• Define a Role for each contractor that will be named by the person name (e.g. “John Brown”),

• Create a single shared Team Scheme that maps Jira users to those roles,

• Create a single shared Price List with contrators' hourly rates (e.g. 60/hour for John). The rate currency will be taken from the invoice.

Then:

• Create an Invoice Template for each contractor,

• Add a Time-Based Line filtered by their worklogs (Employee filter),

• Assign our shared team scheme and price list,

• Link the template to their Invoice Layout and the “Contractors” client.

• If you're using QuickBooks or Xero, make sure to link the invoice template to the contractor contact that was imported from your accounting system. There is no “Contractors” client in this case.

💡 Tip: You can duplicate templates to speed up setup for multiple contractors.

5. ⚡ Generate All Invoices With One Click

Once all templates are ready (one-time setup), at the end of each billing cycle:

• Open the Invoice Generator,

• Click “Generate Invoices” — and you’re done.

Clerk will generate all invoices — one per contractor — based on their templates, branding, and billing model. So at the end of each month — or any billing cycle — all it takes is a single click:

6. 📤 Export, Send or Sync

Once invoices are generated, you can:

• Export to PDF or Excel (individually or merged);

• Send invoices via email to yourself or to the contractor;

• Sync to QuickBooks or Xero for full accounting integration;

• Export invoices via API for integration with other systems;

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🎯 Summary

Clerk Invoices turns Jira into a contractor billing engine:

• Every contractor gets automatically generated, branded, and accurate invoices,

• You save hours each month and eliminate billing errors,

• Your finance workflow becomes smoother, faster, and scalable.

✅ Ready to Try It?

You can get started in just a few minutes:

• 👉 Try Clerk Invoices on the Atlassian Marketplace

• ▶️ Watch the product demo to see the app in action

• 🎥 Browse tutorial videos for step-by-step guides and use cases

• 🧰 Explore the full Hello Clerk financial suite for Jira — budgets, product catalogs, client quotes, and more

Have questions? Drop them in the comments below — we’re happy to help!

[Anton Skorniakov]

Just a quick note — while this article focuses on generating invoices from Jira/Tempo worklogs, there’s also fine-grained control over how invoices are exported to QuickBooks or Xero.

You can apply categories or accounts, set taxes, etc.

It’s a bit outside the scope of this post — but if that’s something you'd like to see covered, let me know and I’ll be happy to share more!