The team I'm part of manage a number of software projects - and most of the stuff we do is end to end, from requirements tracking, to project management to purchasing and setup - a big pain is tracking of financials as we have a whole process to go through for our financials. At the moment we use a spreadsheet and store all the invoices and purchase orders in a shared folder. Its difficult to capture expenses and relate them back to projects that are ongoing or completed. Anyone got better ideas? Hope this topic is relevant.
I'm just throwing this out there but Scrum seems like a methodology that might lend itself to tracking this kind of stuff easily.
I use the time tracking aspects of JIRA with a bunch of custom fields that let me note issues as having been billed for (complete with storing the invoice number details against the JIRA issue). It's easy to relate hours worked to time billed. Might not work if you're billing for functionality rather than hours, but for $/hr work it's perfect.
You're talking about bookkeeping. Your best bet is probably to talk to accountant who organised books for a software company before. Alternatively you could read up on bookkeeping basics.
This question is not strictly software development related, although software business has some traits that make it different, i.e. absence of raw materials.
Best of luck with your question, I personally find it interesting, but I don't believe it belongs on stackoverflow.
you could try http://projectsputnik.com This software combines project management and billing
If you are using Jira, you can try Clerk — Invoicing and Billing for Jira app. Jira has projects and time tracking feature and this add-on does the invoicing and billing on top of that. I hope that helps.
How about using a wiki, something like Confluence? And then you can export to a spreadsheet. and import back again...
Related
At my enterprise, we utilize Problem Management to eliminate recurring incidents of course - but how do we organize efforts to eliminate recurring requests?
We are trying to minimize debt by shifting some work to cheaper teams or even outside of IT, consider changing the framework of our applications in order save money in the long run by adding a feature to let the users update things on their own, or even weigh the pros and cons of building out automation to replace manual labor. It would be great if we could tie all of the Service Request or Catalog Tasks together similar to a Problem record - and provide a place for us to organize our efforts or progress made.
Does anyone have any solutions to this? How do you organize your requests?
One solution was to just use Problem and classify them differently - but the cons are that Problem doesn't include Requests in ITIL. Another idea was to build another module that functioned similarly to Problem, but had its own fields and name. We would love to organize this directly in ServiceNow - and would like to have more functionality that PA Dashboards can provide.
Thank you in advance!
The orchestration plugin/module comes with an ROI app which helps you calculate and report on the amount of time/man hours/dollars you are saving with your automation efforts. It basically just tracks tasks and assigns a monetary value based on the salary or wage of the performer that usually executes the task.
Rally obviously has some Defect Tracking capabilities.
My question is; it is good/flexible enough to serve as the sole Defect Tracker of an organization? Or is it more common that general defect tracking is done in another tool like Bugzilla or JIRA? (Possibly using a Rally Connector to integrate them).
We are currently on Bugzilla but are ramping up Rally usage. If Rally can do Bugzilla's job, I'd happily get rid of Bugzilla and have one less system to worry about. Has anybody done that?
Stack Overflow is usually used to ask and answer questions regarding programming and code. So this is probably not the best forum to get an accurate answer to your question. That being said...
I have been a Rally engineer for a number of years. Internally we use Rally to manage our defects and I personally think it is a painless solution. The way that Rally can roll up defects and the work they represent from a task level all the way to the portfolio level is useful and I personally hate to waste my time trying to keep multiple systems in sync.
I know plenty of customers still use other defect tracking solutions in conjunction with Rally using our connectors and they seem pretty satisfied with that hybrid solution. I was on the team that maintained those connectors last year and we had plenty of happy customers. I actually was one of the pair that wrote the initial Bugzilla connector and it worked well to keep the systems in sync.
Probably not the most impartial answer but I would at least check into just using Rally and if it seems to be missing something you loved in your old system take the time to let us know through Rally Ideas.
I'm looking for a free or commercial issue tracker. I've looked at a dozen of them, but I can't find what I need.
These are my requirements:
Not only for software. I need a more general tracker in which "complaints" about products other than software can also be recorded.
Very easy to use, for non-technical users
(optional) rich text editing, possibility to add images between the lines, etc.
I've looked at Bugzilla, SupportSuite, Mantis, but these are to much software oriented for my case.
Strange, no-one mentioned Trello [ www.trello.com ]
Its :
General purpose
Software related tracking can also be done
Collaboration on anything with multiple people
Free to use [ Even for multiple users ]
Aimed at a non-technical user
Perfect for your use-case.
Or take a loot at Gemini -- we have IT hardware, Help Desk and all our software dev projects in one place. Gemini does allow for different "meta data" per project type so this works for us. Look at their "white paper" - may be of help to you in terms of set up.
Usually the commercial ones are more polished than the open-source ones, here are some options:
Atlassian JIRA - an industry veteran, very complete solution. If you have a small team (up to 5 people), they also used to have a very low-cost version.
JetBrains YouTrack - relative newcomer, an probably a bit too "keyboard-centric" for your needs.
See also comparison of issue-tracking systems.
Maybe you're looking for a service like http://getsatisfaction.com/ or http://uservoice.com/. They are very customer-centric, and I've seen them used both for software products and for feedback on other things entirely.
Also, I've made Mantis receive email directly both to new and existing issues - f.ex. if subject contains an issue number like [1234] the email becomes a note to the issue 1234.
This way the customer doesn't know about Mantis, you can bcc Mantis with issue numbers, and it's possible to customize workflow in Mantis very much to suit your process needs.
In addition, you can have separate projects in Mantis which can receive from different email addresses, like one for bugs and one for support issues.
Try out Assembla, am not sure whether it is free or what.
Or you may try with googling JIRA
It is for a small business, looking for the best solution... Did a search and only came up with very specific question related to ecommerce
May be worth taking a look at http://shopify.com/
OSCommerce is a well proven, free ecommerce solution, which is easy to set up
You might also consider just opening up an eBay store :) That way you essentially get free advertising, search engine indexing etc.
I always suggest that a company that is very small start with an open source solution such as DashCommerce. This way you get the development experience of the people supporting that project, plus the tested framework that many other companies are already using. The more people that use the code base the more reliable it is. Also, the more plugin type features that it might support such as tax, shipping, etc.
Take a look at DashCommerce's feature list to get an idea of what a complete ecommerce system should have.
Yahoo! Stores has one of the easiest ecommerce setups and has low upfront costs. The ongoing fees is how they make their money, and it becomes expensive with more volume.
A similar question has been asked: MSDN subscriptions on the cheap?, but I am not interested in the solutions provided:
I am not developing a product for sale, I am starting up a consulting company, so Empower is not an option.
I have visited the links to MS regarding MSDN subscriptions and they do not point to a way to get an inexpensive copy.
I am not interested in suggestions that I become a MVP. Frankly, I'm desiring to focus on developing my company, not jumping through MS's hoops.
There are really only a few options available
Buy it at standard price
Become a Microsoft Certified Partner, and get a good discount (Actually much simpler than you would think, I did it in under 2 weeks for my business)
Find a MVP buddy that is willing to share a free giveaway
But in all reality, these are the ONLY legal options. You might also try calling Microsoft, you never know what might happen, they have many special programs that are not necessarily publicly advertised.
What you want is the Action Pack: https://partner.microsoft.com/US/40016455.
(Note, as an employee of Microsoft, I apologize that you have to LOG OUT of your LiveID to see this page if that LiveID is not already attached to a Registered Partner.)
You don't have to be certified to get access to this, just registered (there are three levels of partnership: 1. Registered, 2. Certified, 3. Gold Certified). You do have to pass a fairly simple assessment test, though.
See the pdf referenced at https://partner.microsoft.com/US/40082823 for an overview of the process.
One last thing - if you are a student (I suspect the OP is not), you can get many Microsoft tools free from http://www.dreamspark.com.
Surely your consultancy will need a website in ASP.NET and perhaps your clients would like a widget that talks directly to a web service on your site? There's your product.
Also, look into "Value added Services" amongst the Empower documentation.
I'm on the Empower program - there really aren't any barriers to entry, as such.
I used to go directly through MS, but nowadays, I always order mine through Xtras.net - they have good multi-year discounts and you manage the subscription online through Microsoft's site as normal.
Does Empower require that the 'main' use is developing a product?
You can always develop a product as well - doesn't have to be very sucessfull, perhaps something to display the time in a window?