Creating Non-billable Tempo Accounts for Tracking Internal Hours

Internal issues are used in Tempo to track and plan time related to non-project related activities that are considered as non-billable, such as vacation, sickness, company events, or onboarding and training. You can create Internal-type Tempo accounts to track the time spent on internal issues and organize them as you like.

Internal Tempo accounts can be useful when there are several teams that need to track their own Internal issues, such as tracking training or events specific to each team. Or Internal Tempo accounts can help you more easily aggregate and report on the logged time from Internal issues that are spread across multiple Jira projects.

About Billable Hours

When you configure Jira issues as Internal in Tempo, the Billable hours field is prevented from being displayed in the Log Time form. As well, no billable data will appear for the Internal issues in the Billable column in Logged Time reports. This is because Internal issues are used for tracking activities that are not billable.

However, if you're tracking internal hours with Jira issues that are not configured as Internal in Tempo, billable hours may mistakenly be included when logging time. Using an Internal-type Tempo account doesn't prevent hours from being logged as billable: you still need to enter 0 in the Billable hours field if it appears in the Log Time form. Only then will there be 0 hours displayed for these issues in the Billable column in reports.

See Best Practices for Tracking Billable Hours for more information on the Billable hours field.

Create an Internal Type Tempo Account

1. Create one or more Tempo accounts for the internal issues and name them appropriately.

2. Create an Account Category with the Category Type of Internal and assign all Internal accounts to this category. You can also select the correct Internal account category when you're creating the Tempo accounts.

   The account Category Type is only a label and does not change any other settings in Tempo; however, you can filter logged time data by the account's Category Type in a report, which is very useful for finding only accounts that are of the Internal type.

3. Link the Internal account to a Jira project that contains the Internal issues so that employees can select this account when they're logging their time to internal issues.

   The Internal account can be linked to the issues themselves if the Account field is available in the Jira issues. Then all time logged to this issue is automatically associated with this Internal account.

4. Employees log their time, making sure to select this Internal account from the Account dropdown in the Log Time form, if the Account work attribute has been configured.

   If the Billable hours field appears in the Log Time form, they must enter 0 hours there since this field automatically uses the same number of hours entered in the Duration field for total hours worked - see Best Practices for Tracking Billable Hours for more information on the Billable hours field.

5. Now when you run a report on your Internal Tempo accounts, no hours that were logged to the Internal Issues account should be included in the Billable column, so your data is clean.

• You can filter reports by Category Type and select Internal to see all Internal accounts in your organization. Or filter by a specific Account Category that is of the Internal type to see only Internal accounts in that category.

• You can also create a JQL filter that includes the appropriate Internal accounts, projects, and issues that you want to see to make it faster to run reports.

• To bulk-edit the time data entered in the Billable hours field in worklogs, such as setting it all to 0, see Editing Worklogs in Bulk or watch this video How to Edit the Billable Hours in Worklogs in Bulk