Tracking monthly customer hour agreements

[Pedro Lima]

Hi,

I believe this is a very common thing along IT companies. Monthly agreements that companies have with customers with a pack of x hours per month that are commulative (positively and negatively).

We have some agreements with that and we do those tracking with excel files, but we would love to have this integrated with Jira so that we could avoid duplicating work between inserting tasks in Jira and having then to insert information inside excel files.

Also, we usually share that information with customers since we use Google Drive to have those and other documents.

I've been Googling for answers but I cannot find something that can suite, at least, my first question. The second one (the access to that info by our customers) we wouldn't mind to do it manually, sending a report at the end of each month, although the ideal would be to have that in Jira as well with a "view" permission or something like that.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Best regards,
Pedro Lima

[Mathieu Lebougre]

Hello,

I find myself in the same situation but for a contract of hours over the year.
We keep track of this too thanks to an excel file but it's very tedious.

Waiting for a miracle solution from Atlassian ;)

[Mark O'Malley]

Hi Pedro, We have the same requirement (exactly actually)

Did you identify a resolution to your requirement, if so would you mind sharing how you went about it

Kind Regards

Mark 

[Pedro Lima]

Hi Mark,

Well, not really, unfortunately!

I like to help, so if I find a valid solution I will definitely remember to get back here and write my solution for this (I am used to do it in stackoverflow).

Best regards,
Pedro

[Daina Tupule eazyBI]

In eazyBI you can automate budget reports based on logged time with some additional data import.

Let's take the same example as Jack described. You have logged time for issues by customer. You have a budget per customer and project. I assume you have a rate for users who logged time as well. 

eazyBI support data analysis by logged hours per time, user, project, and customers by default.

In addition, you would like to import rate for users and calculate the cost per time, project, customer.

You can import budget to project and customer as well and create reports comparing cost and budget.

You can see more details in this similar use case How to build profit loss report with additional data import

Daina / support@eazybi.com

[Pedro Lima]

Hi Daina,

Thank you for taking your time, but we use the cloud version and for that you don't have this module.

Best regards,
Pedro Lima

[Jack Brickey]

This certainly should be doable using a filter. Without understanding exactly how your instance is setup I can't give you exact directions but will try to convey key points.

1. Obviously you must be logging time. I assume you are already doing this.
2. You must be differentiating your customers via a custom field "Customer" with a drop down.
3. You should create a filter that looks something like this - project = abc and customer = 123 and (worklogDate >= startOfMonth() or worklogDate <= startOfMonth()). Now I haven't tested this specifically so you will need to play w/ it a bit to attain your desired results.
4. Save the filter and set up a subscription to email this out to whomever.

Now, this isn't going to give you a simple calculated sum of the hours spent but this could be attained using an addon I suspect and would recommend investigating this a bit. Maybe EazyBi would be a good option or possibly Worklogs Report (cloud only).

[Pedro Lima]

Hi Jack,

Thank you for your help.

The thing is, this does not give me an automated control over my previous hours.

I mean, let me give you an example:

I have a contract with a customer for a pack of 5h /month, which are comulative. In the first month we worked 7 hours, so this means this customer will have 5h - 2h on the next month. Then on the next month we worked another 7 hours to this customer, this means on the third month the total would be 5h - 4h.

And so on... I believe you get the idea now.

The thing is, I don't want to be checking this manually, I want "something" to automatically check, for each month, the total "Time tracking" that existed for each issue and sum that to give me a positive or negative number from the time left for that monthly agreement.

The filter you mention, it's not a bad idea but it doesn't make what we are looking for and for this it's probably better if we simply work with Excel sheets as we are doing.

Another possibility is simply registering everything in Jira, then export to excel and work the hours left manually each month - and that's probably what we will end up doing.

Thank you very much for your time though.

Best regards,
Pedro Lima