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Aynax invoice template for Product Management

[Music] hi i have a short question for you do you like to lose money [Music] i guess no i'm anton the founder of hello clerk we do financial apps for the atlassian ecosystem today i will speak about invoicing best practices that you can use with atlassian products and i will mostly talk about hourly billing in the end you will know how to set up jira for invoicing how you can automate your invoicing process and how to make integration with your accounting systems let's look at the common invoicing process everything starts with organizing jira projects that you could effectively work with time locked next you need to have a time tracking that will guarantee that nobody will miss or mass team time the next step is to build invoices from team hours and most likely export them to your accounting system and after invoices are built we'll need to manage them send to clients track their status etc so let's go through each step and talk about its best practices the first very important step is the proper organization of jira projects that will help you to easily separate log time for different cases for example the time of the specific client billable time or time of all senior developers is easy fields play a big role in time filtration as you know jira issues or tickets have two types of fields standard ones which are built in and custom ones that you can create by yourself i recommend using standard built-in jira fields as much as you can even if custom fields may look like a slightly better fit for your case why use standard because most likely you will use some atlassian marketplace apps to extend jira functionality and such apps usually work much better with standard fields and sometimes they have poor or even no custom field support and even if you plan to build invoices by your own scripts working with standard fields is easier [Music] another important thing to keep in mind is the field scope some fields are visible inside specific jira projects only and some could be global for your entire site i will show more examples soon if your invoicing relies on some issue field don't forget to make it mandatory you don't want to lose your money when someone forgets to send the task or center if you need to make this field not mandatory make it mandatory anyway and just create a separate option with a name like empty or not set so people will not miss it now let's look at specific invoicing tasks we may have and how we can organize jira for that we will start with some simple tasks and finish with more complex at the end the first basic and mandatory task is separating clients time for billing the obvious and easiest way how to deal with this is to create one of you jira projects for each client if you need to see a global picture or manage global priorities you can create a separate jira board that will collect all tasks from all projects in one place if you have many clients with small projects it may be handy to keep all tasks in one jira project let's look at what issue fields could be used to separate time of different clients inside one project the first field we can use is epic you can create epic for each client and set it for each billable task in your project you can use versions or components to specify client for each task but it may lead to mistakes since you can select more than one version or component for each task [Music] and you can always use a single select custom field that will keep a list of all your clients sometimes some big clients may have multiple cost centers that you should set invoices to let's look at how you can separate tasks for different cost centers here we need to take into account field scope if any cost center will be used inside one jira project only it's better to use fields with local project scope otherwise you need to use global scope fields the easiest way to separate cost centers time is to create a separate jira project for each cost center if cost centers will live only inside one jira project you can use versions or components the only thing you need to watch is not to select multiple cost centers for some tasks using epics for setting cost centers could be not the best option since usually only complex projects have multiple cost centers and most likely you would like to use epic to group smaller tasks [Music] you can use a custom field to separate time for different cost centers but keep in mind that custom fields are global so this drop down will show the cost centers of all your clients sometimes you may have billable and non-billable time on the project let's look at how you can separate this time the first option is to create a separate issue types for example billable task and non-billable task and to lock each type of time into the corresponding task separating billable and non-billable time by apex could be not the best choice since usually apex are used inside one jira project and same point about versions and components they also live inside one jira project plus it's a multi-select field a good option is to use a custom field from a first glance the checkbox is the best fit for this but it may lead to mistakes it could be unchecked because someone has just forgotten to check it so the better option is to use a mandatory single cell at least here these options are good but they may not work for all cases for example if someone has spent too much time on the task and you want only part of this time to be included in the invoice and the rest of the time will be written off in this case the only suitable option is to use some third-party apps that allow login billable and non-billable time separately into one task this is how it works in tempo timesheets sometimes you need to separate time for work in a specific status let's look at how you can do this if you need to separate time for the completed tasks or close support tickets the native way to do this is by issue status if closed tasks may have multiple statuses like done contra produce skipped etc you can use a single resolution field if it's not empty it means that the issue is resolved and ready for invoicing if you use jira versions to group your tasks you can separate time for a list version only that works natively in jira if you go by sprinting jira then you also have a native way to separate time for completed sprints and of course you can use a custom user field if built-in options don't work for you sometimes you need to use different traits for different types of work no matter who worked on the task for example if people frequently switch between roles let's say our lead developer may do both development automated qa and ba project manager or another example we charge all team meetings at a flat rate let's see how we can separate time in these cases the best option would be to use issue types you simply create a separate issue type for each work type another option is to use a custom field of course [Music] and using epics versions or components is not the best idea since they exist inside one project only and sometimes this fields a lot multiple selections and maybe the most popular way is to charge different rates for different roles and seniority levels as opposite to the previous case we only care about who works on the task whatever the task is let's see what we can do in this case jira doesn't have any suitable means for working with team roles so we have to use some third-party apps that can handle this for example clerk invoices allows creating multiple team schemes that define the structure of the team by specifying team roles and very frequently you need to mix multiple approaches at the same time let's look at the example let's say that first you need to separate billable time and use tempo timesheets for this purpose then you need to charge different trades for different team roles and decided to use clerking vs team schemes for that and finally you need to charge for all your team meetings at a lower flat rate and you are using jira issue type meeting to separate that time now let's look at the time tracking process time tracking is a pretty straightforward thing and i will give just a couple of advices here let's look at what tool to use for time tracking jira has simple built-in time tracking that allows just log time into issues and there is a couple of some very basic time reports most likely for invoicing purposes you will need something more advanced so take a look at some third-party time tracking apps in the atlassian marketplace it's a very good practice to make a timesheet's approval process at the end of the month when team leads review log time and check that there are no suspicious time entries for example some person may lock time in a wrong task by mistake and that may cause problems with the client [Music] it's also a very good practice to close the time period before invoicing that guarantees that nobody can change log time after we send invoices to clients now let's look at how you can create invoices and most probably export them to your accounting system the first way is manual you will need the following tools for that some time reporting app from the atlassian marketplace to filter time by different criterias with the ability to export that time in time reports and some tool to manually create invoices that could be a spreadsheet app where you can program your custom invoicing logic if you need it or that could be some accounting app the advantage of this way is flexibility you can do whatever you want but the disadvantage is that it it's slow boring manual work that may lead to human mistakes the next way is self-made scripts that pull time from jira build invoices and time reports and send them to your accounting system the tools you may need in this case are some runtime environment to run scripts jira query language to implement time filtration logic and some accounting system that will manage created invoices the advantage of this way is again flexibility you can do whatever you want plus it automates invoice creation but you need to deal with lots of headaches you need to develop and maintain those scripts need to host them somewhere the scripts should be able to build pretty complex time reports and update specific invoices if work logs are changed in jira and third option is to use some marketplace app for invoicing like clark invoices the only tool that you need in this case is the marketplace app the biggest advantage is that you get a working invoicing and time reports automation it saves time and eliminates human mistakes you get ready-made integrations with some accounting systems and you get invoice management features the cons of this method is that it may not fully cover some tricky invoicing logic and if you are using external accounting system that is not supported out of the box you need to manually import invoices into it or create some simple import scripts now let's look at how you can do invoice management by invoice management i mean sending invoices to clients tracking invoice statuses looking at analytics etc the tool that you will use depends on your task if you need to do invoice management only without full-featured accounting then you can use some atlas and marketplace app for that that would be a perfect fit if you need something more advanced you need to go with external accounting or erp systems and export invoices there for more complex cases you may use a mixed approach and use a hierarchy of tools for example you may have multiple legal entities in different countries and each entity may have a dedicated accountant and a connection with a local accounting system so you can make some global top-level invoice management in the marketplace app like clerk invoices and make a mix of automatic and manual connections with isolated local accounting systems okay so what's next if you find some advice is helpful you can take a look at your invoicing process in jira try to see how you can improve it and create a change plan or if you are just thinking about switching to jira don't hesitate go and create your first project it's free and if you will have any questions or issues along this way i'm always here to help