Linking Time Tracking & Ticket Billing with projectfacts

Ticket system – linking time tracking and ticket billing

In the first part of our ticket system series, we introduced you to the basic functions and possible applications of a ticket system. There we explored the question: “Ticket system – what is it and what are the advantages?”

The advantages of a ticket system become ever clearer the more you integrate it into your work process. The second part will deal with this topic. A key aspect here is time tracking, and in a later part, the billing of times. Support employees must, just like other employees, record their working time. While many employees record their times project-specifically, this is not automatically given when processing tickets.

So how should times incurred during ticket processing ideally be recorded? And how do you ensure proper billing of these times?

Time tracking on tickets

In many companies, time tracking is still carried out separately from ticket processing – often even in different systems. However, this separation brings a whole range of disadvantages. First and foremost, you can never get an indication of the effort involved in individual tickets. Significant time losses also arise in employees’ daily use. The employee constantly has to switch between two systems or input areas.

By integrating time tracking into the ticket system, you can eliminate this disadvantage:

• Times can be booked directly when processing the ticket (often also with a stopwatch function)
• Times are assigned to the matching ticket

On the one hand, the employee saves considerable time, and on the other hand there is now a direct assignment of effort to the ticket. This gives you far greater reporting options.

Ultimately, the combination of time tracking and the ticket system is also the foundation for a functioning ticket billing process.

Ticket billing for booked times

If companies deploy a comprehensive ticket system and use it as a communication medium with their clients, the question of billing tickets comes into play. But what is the best way to bill tickets? By unit count? By effort? With flat rates?

As you can see, there are several options here. Billing by unit count is used extremely rarely. Because the number of tickets gives no indication at all of how much effort the client’s request involved.

The effort of a request, however, is very closely linked to time tracking. Logically, a ticket involving greater effort should also have more or longer times booked to it. The prerequisite for ticket billing by effort is therefore targeted time tracking on tickets. Because only in this way can the correct assignment of effort take place.

The major question that now arises, however, is: how do I get the tickets billed as quickly as possible? Here too, in many cases a separate tool is still used for billing. Often the billable times are transferred manually into the invoice. Errors are inevitable here.

If you now also integrate billing into the ticket system, you have the following advantages instead:

• Order management is directly linked to the tickets
• Time bookings on the ticket are automatically transferred to the orders
• Times can be billed with a stored hourly rate
• Activity description and ticket identifier are transferred to the invoice

Booked times on tickets are not always billed 1:1. Another aspect is ticket billing via flat rates. These are frequently stipulated in so-called maintenance or support contracts.

Managing maintenance and support contracts

These contracts are generally structured so that the client pays a flat-rate amount for the processing of their tickets. In most cases this amount includes a fixed time budget. If this time budget is exceeded, the additional effort is billed separately.

In this case too, the advantages of an integrated solution are obvious. In an automated manner, the billing system can recognise when the limits for the fixed time budget have been reached and how the additional hours should be billed.

Further topics

As you can see, there are a number of reasons why a standalone ticket system in the work process can bring disadvantages. Instead, a solution should be considered that integrates above all time tracking and ideally also billing.

In the third part of the series we will look more closely at a term that plays a major role in the ticket area: Service Level Agreements (SLA). What exactly is meant by this and how do you integrate SLAs into your process?