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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.

Vlad Gudim
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anbanm
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6 Answers6

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I'm just throwing this out there but Scrum seems like a methodology that might lend itself to tracking this kind of stuff easily.

cgp
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  • How would Scrum help in this way? – anbanm Apr 28 '09 at 13:36
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    Scrum asks that you break things down into very small stories etc... You can really break down where your money is being spent because there is a lot of estimation being done on how long things take etc... So, you can track how much is being spent by simply looking at the stories etc.. – cgp Apr 28 '09 at 14:08
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    Scrum is used for tracking progress, not financials. – Fuzzy Purple Monkey Apr 28 '09 at 23:35
  • It was just a thought that maybe the techniques could be adapted – cgp Apr 29 '09 at 00:30
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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.

Vlad Gudim
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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.

Andrew
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you could try http://projectsputnik.com This software combines project management and billing

Dmitry K
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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.

Anton
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How about using a wiki, something like Confluence? And then you can export to a spreadsheet. and import back again...

Yusufk
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