Best Practices for Tracking Billable Hours

Billing your clients or customers for invoicing is a common reason to use Tempo accounts. There are two different ways that you can track billable hours depending on how you want to work and what kind of data you eventually want to get out of a report. You can:

Use both billable and non-billable Tempo accounts for the same customer.
OR
Use the Billable hours field in the Log Time form to track billable hours at the Jira project level.

So, what's the difference between these two methods and what are the advantages of each? Read on and find out!

It's recommended to use either one or the other method for billing hours, just to keep your data clean - see Tempo accounts and the Billable hours field below for why this is important.

Using Billable and Non-billable Tempo Accounts

Accounts are powerful tools that let you add supporting data such as customers and account categories of certain types, and you can also link accounts to Jira projects which then lets you associate an account to Jira issues and/or worklog

It's generally good practice to use Tempo accounts to organize the different types of work that your company does. For this reason, many people like to create separate accounts for billable work and non-billable work as a good way to identify each one when logging time, and especially for easily generating reports. Using accounts, you can list out buckets of work (contracts) across several Jira projects and even several Tempo teams.

Follow the Tracking Billable Work for Invoicing Using Tempo Accounts tutorial or watch this video to see how to create both billable and non-billable Tempo accounts for a customer:

How to Create Tempo Accounts for Tracking Billable Work

Once you have created accounts, you can add more information to them that gives you a depth of useful data for reports and, subsequently, invoices:

Customers - Link customers to one or more accounts, which is useful when you have several customers on the go. For example, each of your customers can have both billable and non-billable accounts. Having customers linked to accounts also gives you more options for filtering data in reports.
Account Category - Each account can have an Account Category. Categories let you group multiple accounts together as you like, such as all accounts that are related to a Consulting category. An Account Category gives you another option for filtering data in reports, such as for finding all accounts in the Development or Marketing category.
Account Category Type - Account categories can have a certain Type: Billable, Internal, Capitalized, and Operational. A Category Type gives you yet another option for filtering data in reports, such as for finding accounts with an account category that is of the Billable Type.
Account field - Add the Account custom field to Jira issue screens, which adds an Account dropdown in Jira issues. Then you can select and link a specific account to that issue. This way, all time logged to that Jira issue is automatically assigned to the Account specified there. Note that you must first link the account to the relevant Jira project in order to make that account available in the Account field in the Jira issue.
Account work attribute - Create an Account work attribute which adds an Account dropdown in the Log Time Form. This way, a specific account can be linked to a worklog when employees log their time. If the Account was already selected in the Jira issue, the same account is automatically selected in the Account dropdown in the Log Time form. See https://tempo-io.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/KB/pages/1827865424 for more information.

Using the Billable hours field in the Log Time form

The Billable hours field gives you a simple way to track billable hours: at the Jira project level, only those with the Set Billable Hours permission will see this field in the Log Time form. This control over who is allowed to bill their hours can help you get more accurate data for invoicing.

The hours that you enter in the Billable hours field are used to calculate revenues for a Tempo Project in Cost Tracker by Tempo.

To make sure that the Billable hours field appears in the Log Time form for only the Jira projects that are related to billable work, it's recommended to create a separate Jira permission scheme for only Jira projects that are granting the Set Billable Hours permission. This way, other Jira projects that are not related to billable work will not have the Billable hours field, which can lead to inaccurate data being entered. See Tracking Billable Hours on Projects for steps on how to do this.

The hours in the Billable hours field default to the same number of hours logged in the Duration field, so remember to adjust the number of Billable hours if necessary - for example, only 6 out of 8 hours worked might be actually billable. And if you don't have any billable hours for this issue, remember to enter 0h in the Billable hours field.

Follow the Tracking Billable Hours on Projects tutorial or watch this video to see how to use the Billable hours field to track billable hours on a Jira project:

How to Track Billable Hours

While using the Billable hours field on its own to track billable hours is very easy to set up, it doesn't allow for more metadata that is useful when running reports, as you have with billable accounts, as mentioned above.

In the Logged Time and Planned vs Actual reports, you can add the Billable column, but the billable data can only appear according to the filters and grouping in your report - that is, you need to first filter a report by other criteria such as Project. It's not possible to filter a report by Billable hours alone.

Tempo accounts and the Billable hours field

Generally, it's not recommended to use Tempo accounts in addition to the Billable hours field to get billable time data since this can create confusion and potential inaccuracies - did you track your hours using the billable Tempo account or in the Billable hours field? When you filter the billable Tempo account data in reports, it may not match up with the hours in the Billable column, which are coming only from the Billable hours field.

As well, if you have the Set Billable Hours permission granted in all your Jira projects, the Billable hours field will show up in the Log Time form for all projects, even for the ones that are not related to billable work, such as internal issues. Logging time to any Tempo account doesn't mean that hours logged in the Billable hours field are ignored: you need make sure to enter 0 in the Billable hours field. And this is because the hours in the Billable hours field default to the same number of hours logged in the Duration field. If you don't enter 0 in this field, these hours appear in the Billable column in reports, which is probably not what you want.

To prevent this issue from happening, see Tracking Billable Hours on Projects for how to create a separate Jira permission scheme to be used only for Jira projects that are granting the Set Billable Hours permission.