Time tracking in Jira with Tempo Timesheets: Organize and evaluate the data

This is the third and final part of a guest post series written by Maxime Nie from Tempo, explaining how you can take advantage of the powerful features of Tempo Timesheets for Jira. The first part was an overview of the features and how you can make time tracking with Tempo Timesheets fit your work style, and the second looked at how you can build the habit of time tracking and customize the information you track with Tempo Timesheets in Jira.

Use Tempo Accounts and Tempo Teams together to organize data

In the two previous posts, we discussed how to capture data through various methods, and how we can ensure this data is useful to the organization. Now we’ll look at two core features of Tempo that are used to organize the data you have captured: Tempo Accounts and Tempo Teams.

Tempo Accounts

You now have a lot of data being captured at every moment of your working hours. Maybe you want to associate that information with a team or a project. For example , if you would like to know how much time is being spent on specific customers, or see a breakdown for every project - Tempo Accounts would be the easiest way to achieve that result.

You should definitely leverage Tempo Accounts as much as possible so that the data captured ends up being useful, organized, and able to provide you with valuable insights.

Tempo Accounts is a core feature of the Tempo Suite and can be found under the Tempo menu (at the top of the page). Accounts lets you create fields (new customers or types of accounts) to later help you segment and organize that data by clients, projects, etc. Note that Tempo Accounts is also used in other Tempo apps (Planner and Budgets).

Tempo Teams

To organize data based on teams, Tempo Teams would be the way to go. This is a very powerful way to track the progress of a team (as opposed to an individual) and can help harness insights related to teams (e.g; capacity, time optimization, etc.)

Tempo Teams is not only used to organize data. Teams can also help team leads and managers get an overview of how well teams are working together, what’s being worked on, etc. In addition, Tempo Teams includes a timesheets view. This is extremely similar to the “Timesheet” view in “My Work”, but allows people with the right permissions to approve team members' timesheets. This could be used to check that the data captured is accurate.

Reports: The place to learn from insights and evaluate ROI

We’ve now seen all of the steps (capturing data in part one and organizing the data in part two) that lead to the reporting stage of Tempo Timesheets. If you've followed the two previous steps correctly, the insights that you'll get out of Tempo Reports will be well worth the effort.

Reports work in a similar fashion to pivot table in Microsoft Excel. They segment your information so that this breakdown illustrates your end goal. For example, you can find how much time was billable vs. non-billable for a certain project/customer, or know how much time worked on a project was as overtime. In other words, Tempo Reports is the analytical tool in Tempo Timesheets and will shed light on how your business operations are going.

Let’s go back to the example of Ian and his 3D effects company. After implementing the “overtime” field via work attributes, Ian wants to discover how much extra he needs to charge his client. Ian can go through a custom report and easily have the result in less than 5 minutes by grouping and filtering using the appropriate fields. In the end, he will see the total amount of “overtime” for the period of his choice, and the filters/groups that he chose to use. He can use that information to initiate a vital process in his business - invoicing. Because these insights are updated in real-time, reports can also be used to improve the communication and transparency during the operation of a business, and help to foster good relationships with clients.

You can select a report from the selection of templates (e.g. Team Report, Account Report, Project Report). Alternatively, you can create and save a custom report for later reuse. Similarly to the Timesheet view in My Work, you can filter and group data based on the end result you’re looking for, and specify a time period. You can print or download your report (e.g. PDF, CSV, etc.). Note that you can access Tempo reports through the Tempo menu (at the top of the page).

Being able to capture the right data in the worklog, and filing that data in Tempo Accounts and Tempo Teams are the two  steps that make Tempo Timesheets extremely useful. You should establish a good foundation of data to ensure that it can provide good and valuable insights. Without this, the report might not portray your data accurately and communicate the story you’re looking for.

Summary

Tempo Timesheets is a productivity app that can provide very powerful insights and drive vital steps in your business (e.g. billing and invoicing). This app can also help optimize the operations of your business (e.g. with resource allocation). We looked at numerous ways that you can get started and build a habit of tracking your time, and discussed some tips to make the adoption of the tool easier.

We then looked at two ways you can customize the data you have captured to get more accurate insights and cater to your needs. We also looked at some easy and effective ways to organize the data using Tempo Teams and Tempo Accounts, and how these create an excellent framework for Tempo Reports.

Finally, we touched upon some of the benefits of using the app from a user’s perspective (e.g. to optimize time spent and improve productivity), and from an organizational standpoint (e.g. appropriate allocation of resources, real-time state of projects, added layers of transparency, easier communication with clients, etc.)

The aim of this series of articles was to give you an introduction to Tempo Timesheets. However, there are many other aspects that we could not deal with here (such as permissions, work attributes, teams, time sheet releases, time sheet planning, accounts, etc.) and numerous use cases that we have not explored (EVM, CAPEX versus OPEX, PPM, etc.) If you would like to learn more about these, take a look at the Tempo website or simply contact us here at //SEIBERT/MEDIA!

About the author

Maxime-Samuel Nie-Rouquette is the Global Partner Marketing Expert at Tempo where he ensures good communication and relations with Tempo Partners and aims to make a positive impact through collaboration. In his spare time, you will find him experimenting with diverse styles of cuisines or in the middle of a game of Catan.

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Do you want to learn more about Tempo Timesheets for Jira? As an experienced Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, we can help you with the official third-party apps available in the Atlassian Marketplace. If you would like any advice, help with licensing or an experience implementation partner, contact us today!

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Further information

Is Jira trapped in your IT and development teams?
Useful apps for Confluence and Jira, arranged by use cases
The advantages of purchasing Atlassian licenses through //SEIBERT/MEDIA

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