Need help managing billable hours shared between customers (using Tempo)

[Allie Stewart]

Hello -  I hope that someone out there can share their experience with this situation because I'm a little brain-blocked right now and I don't know Tempo all that well.

I need some creative ideas as to how to manage billable hours that are shared between multiple customers. 

For example, we may have a product enhancement that 2 customers want, so we would bill each of them 50% of the billed hours.

• We use Organization in Jira to indicate the customer. 
• We use Customer in Tempo for this of course. 
• We have Tempo accounts per customer for "Customer - billable" and "Customer - not billable", etc.
• We have a billable flag and billable% field in Jira.

But I'm struggling to see how to break the cost up on the issue because Account field in Jira is single-select only.

Does anyone have any suggestions or best practices for handling this situation?  

Thank you in advance for any of your thoughts and ideas!!

[Mykenna Cepek · Accepted solution]

Sounds like you're using Tempo in all the right ways (good job!).

But your use-case is tricky.

Have you explored creating a separate Account for each set of "customers being split"?

Allow me to assume you only want to split billable hours, and that the Product Enhancement  applies to customers "A" and "B". 

Then perhaps create a billable Account "A and B" which would be used only for the work that pertains to that Product Enhancement. Then you can just split the total in that account.

The expansion in the number of Accounts might be undesirable, but this might get the job done.

[Allie Stewart]

Thank you but this won't work for us as we can share the costs across any/all accounts.  We can even break it into thirds and share with 3 clients.  This one is tricky for sure.

[Mykenna Cepek]

I've offered 3 solutions here, and this still might be the most feasible one. I like it best because the Accounts can be custom configured on each Project.

So "Project A" in Jira could have Accounts "Client A" and "Client A+B+C". Time loggers could easily identify work done in Project A as being only for Client A or effort that will also be shared with clients B and C also.

This approach is a complicated configuration, but it allows for minimal hassle at the back end of billing, as well as a simple and clear interface for folks logging their time.

[Mykenna Cepek]

Another potential solution is to use fields on the individual Jira issues themselves to characterize aspects of the billing. This will unfortunately be completely separate from the nice structure in Tempo (Accounts, Categories, etc).

But Tempo Reporting can handle Jira fields equally well as Accounts. So there may be something to explore there as a possible solution. Subtracting out the "shared" total from the final total for a given client still might be a manual back-office step.

Managing fields like this per-issue is gross. But Jira automation can help do things like replicate such a field from an Epic down into its child issues (e.g. for an Epic where all the work is split across multiple clients). That will eliminate manual maintenance of the field for everything under that Epic.

[Mykenna Cepek]

Check out the "Account Work Attributes" features in Tempo Timesheets. Some potential solutions for your use-case:

• Add a simple "Shared Work" checkbox to the "Log Time" dialog. When logging time, folks would check this to indicate the work was shared across clients. Figuring out how to split work tagged this way is pushed later in the billing process.
• Add a drop-down for each "split group", such as "CustA/CustB/CustC". Again, available when logging time, and will have to divide the totals out later.

I think Work Attributes are global across all projects, but users can customize which Work Attribute fields they want to see in their "Log Time" dialog.

Again, every combination will need it's own entry, so if that happens a lot, may get messy.

Documentation:

Cloud:  https://tempo-io.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/HCTIMESHEETS/pages/3374646594/Creating+Work+Attributes+for+Customized+Time+Logging

DC/Server: https://tempo-io.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/HCTIMESHEETSDC/pages/3389397064/Configuring+Work+Attributes