Billing customers from JIRA - is that possible?

Question

Our development team works with Jira Software and we aim to use JIRA for other business processes inside our organization:

• Internal and external support;
• Customer success;
• Applications building;
• Implementation projects that are executed by business organization, in other words, building solutions based on the core platform.

Project execution contains:

1. Planning resources (available hours vs planned hours);
2. Visualizing project phases and dependencies;
3. Managing fixed price projects, time and material.

Here we have researched and found many time tracking and project management plugins for JIRA that can help us.

What we are struggling with now, is to find a way to efficiently cope with the following:

1.Store and manage customer data,like billing details;

2.Invoice customers based on the type of project: fixed price or time and material. For example, the second phase of the project came to its end - billing 40% of the agreed price. Or 30 hours of planned hours were time-tracked and approved for billing - post an invoice;

3.Manage invoice templates.

Could you please advise with a way to accomplish the above for JIRA cloud?

Answer 1

The functionalities you mentioned (Store and manage customer data / Invoice customers based on the type of project) are usually done using a proper Customer Relationship Management(CRM) software.

Jira is a great and very customisable tool, even offering some CRM plugins.

Happens that, even the best plugin won't be replacing a dedicated software. You can experiment some available Jira CRM plugins. If they work for you, great! If they don't, you may consider looking for a CRM-specific solution.

Answer 2

Jira is an issue tracker, not a billing machine. With Jira you track tasks (e.g. to invoice the customer A), but nothing of those three things you listed.

Another thing, it seems that you don't have a system administrator. You definitely need one, especially if you have different user groups with different system rights.

Answer 3

I think the Clerk — Invoicing and Billing for Jira plugin will do the job.

It can create both fixed price and time and materials invoices from Jira worklogs, can work with retainers. And it builds nice analytics on top of that, like monthly cash flow, total client debt, client profitability etc.