The professional services guide to Timesheets and Capacity Planner

If your teams are working in Jira – you’ll know the ecosystem is moving towards a setup where more and more businesses centralize their processes and look to have as few tools as possible that all integrate together.

If your teams need invoicing, time tracking, resource management, and billing, then there is no better place to start looking than Jira’s no #1 best-selling software for exactly that: Timesheets and Capacity Planner.

We designed these two tools to work in a seamless environment together – so you can overcome all the common challenges that stop PSA companies from taking their operations to the next level.

What makes business growth difficult for Professional Services Automation?

There is a frustrating reality for professional services businesses (and all businesses): Knowing about the challenges you are facing and actually having the ability to address and overcome them are two very different things.

Things get complicated due to just how many interrelated functions it has going on compared to other companies. A major professional services company is probably juggling multiple tools for resource management, project management, billing, and reporting.

Growth starts to get impacted when teams start working in silos due to differing processes, software needs upgrading, or some things just start falling off because they are too much of a time sink and people feel they “aren’t in their job description”.

In the world of professional services, having a solid centralized tool that can take care of these varying needs is crucial, as even the smallest mistake can prove costly in a highly competitive industry. Accurate customer billing is a particularly important factor, especially when it comes to maintaining prosperous customer relationships.

Clients often need or desire transparent information and to be able to access account data in real time. They need to be assured that projects will be delivered within contract scopes, on schedule, and on budget.

The ultimate goal of any large business is to keep employees happy, meet project deadlines and budgets, and keep track of how people and efforts are being distributed within the organization.

Stated plainly: Timesheets and Capacity Planner do exactly this. They were made to address these issues and integrate seamlessly together to create that unified working experience to stop silos or outdated tech hindering your growth.

Five reasons you need Timesheets and Capacity Planner

Put simply, you need Timesheets to track the time being spent on each project, and you need Capacity Planner to ensure projects get the right resources allocated. But there’s a number of other reasons professional services teams trust Timesheets and Planner – five in fact.

1. Enhanced time management and tracking

Unlike other tools, Timesheets is native to Jira, and fully integrated with the most popular calendars, IDEs, and other dev tools. This means your data is not only accurate, but comprehensive.

That means you can track everything: From client facing project work, to meetings, to internal issues such as vacations, meetings and sick days, Timesheets accounts for it all.

Timesheets allows teams to manage time by customer, activity (work attribute), CapEx vs. OpEx, and more. This comprehensive tracking ensures precise billing and invoicing, ensuring clients are billed correctly and minimizes revenue leakage.

2. Improved resource management

Capacity Planner helps in forecasting resource availability and workload, allowing teams to plan and allocate resources effectively. This ensures that no team member is over or underutilized.

By understanding capacity, teams can schedule projects more effectively, aligning deadlines with available resources and avoiding bottlenecks.

3. Strategic decision making

By leveraging historical data via the planned vs. actual reporting, Timesheets and Capacity Planner empowers strategic decisions. Teams can identify trends, forecast future needs, and make informed decisions about hiring, project acceptance, and resource allocation.

It also allows you to monitor the health status over your entire portfolio. By tracking time and capacity, managers can monitor team performance and provide targeted support where needed, in real-time.

4. Enhanced collaboration and communication

Time tracking and capacity planning tools promote transparency within the team, ensuring everyone is aware of their tasks and deadlines. That means you start to break through to those siloes as just by doing their day-to-day work, they automatically inform others. 

The clear and concise reports generated from Timesheets and Capacity Planner can also be shared, providing any relevant team or individual with insights into project progress and resource utilization.

With a clear plan of who’s doing what, and improved visibility, teams are better aligned to the company’s objectives. This is especially important for distributed teams.

5. Increased efficiency and productivity

Automating time tracking and capacity planning reduces manual entry and administrative tasks, freeing up time for more value-added activities that people regard as their “actual” work. Timesheets uses machine learning to make logging time a two minute task.

By continuously analyzing time and resource data through plan vs. actual reporting (more on this below), teams can optimize their processes, improving overall efficiency and productivity.

By integrating Timesheets and Capacity Planner, professional services teams can enhance their operational efficiency, make informed strategic decisions, and ultimately deliver better results for their clients.

Related article: Tracking time in Jira with Timesheets: A beginner's guide

The pièce de résistance: The planned vs. actual report

One of the most powerful reports in Tempo is the planned vs. actual report, which requires both Timesheets and Planner. With it, team leads can limit unknowns and build more accurate plans for their resources. What the report does is allow you to look at how much time you planned compared to how much time you spent on a given initiative.

Related article: The planned vs. actual report in Jira with Tempo

By regularly running the planned vs. actual report over the lifetime of a project, managers can monitor and evaluate how their teams are doing. They can take action to stay on track, such as adding or removing resources.

This report helps managers to monitor the progress of their projects. Based on the numbers collected from the planned vs. actual report, they can adjust future forecasts and determine how long projects actually take. Learning to make better estimates opens the door to greater profitability.

Related article: Estimating time in project management: Tips and methodologies

Book a demo to learn more

To see how Capacity Planner and Timesheets work better together, book a personalized demo today with a Tempo product expert.