Best Practices for Using Tempo Accounts

Tempo accounts are flexible and can be used in different ways for many purposes. Here are some tips to keep in mind for using Tempo accounts in an optimal way: 

• We recommend that you create and set up Tempo accounts before rolling out Tempo to your whole organization. Then, everyone can log time to the correct account from the outset - see Setting up accounts and Creating Tempo Accounts.

• Use consistent naming conventions for accounts so that everyone in your organization knows which accounts can be used for which project or initiative and for what purpose. This often follows the Category Type for an account - Creating Tempo Account Categories.

• We recommend that you use either billable Tempo accounts or the Billable hours field for logging billable hours. Using the two methods together can cause confusion and inaccurate data - see Best Practices for Tracking Billable Hours.

• Time logged to issues that are used for non-project work - but that are not configured in Tempo as Internal - may be incorrectly included as part of billable hours. As internal issues are usually not billable, you can create a non-billable account for them that will be excluded from the data when running reports on billable hours - see Creating non-billable Tempo accounts for tracking internal hours.

• You can link an account to all Jira projects in your instance (called Global accounts) on the Account's Overview.

• It's recommended to use accounts only for one year at a time, especially if you're using Global accounts. This is to avoid linking to old Jira projects that may not be used anymore, which can cause performance issues. You can create new accounts each year as you need them. Keep your Jira and Tempo house clean!

• At the end of the year, or when the project or initiative is over, the account can be closed by the Tempo Account Administrator or the Account Lead for that account. Eventually, accounts can be archived so that they don't show up in reports or won't be exported along with other account data.

• It's recommended to archive or close an account instead of deleting it when you're finished with it. This is because to delete an account, it cannot be linked to any Jira projects and issues: it may take some effort to unlink the account from everywhere it's used.

• Data from all open and closed accounts can be exported to a CSV file.

• You can bulk-edit the account selected using the Account work attribute in multiple worklogs for a user - see Editing Worklogs in Bulk