OTRS as a billing tool for a consulting company

[dwg]

I need a way to allow an agent to enter billable time with each article: entering a new note, closing the ticket, etc.
Then, I need a way to report on this billable time to hand to our billing department for invoicing.

My procedure is attached as a PDF and I would be pleased if anyone wished to use, review or suggest upon it.

It is at a for-dummies level (sorry!) and uses OTRS, MS Access 2010 and MySQL ODBC drivers. I am not a talented developer and may be missing some very elegant ways to do this entirely within OTRS.

Here is the summary from the document:
Summary
-This document describes a prototype for a way to configure OTRS to allow agents to enter billable time at the ‘article’ level and allows for a way for an admin to retrieve this billable time, with Microsoft Access, and to mark it as retrieved so that it will not be billed again. Each time an agent adds a note or closes a ticket they will have an opportunity to add some billable time to the ticket.
-I am not a talented developer so may have missed a more elegant way to do this entirely within OTRS.
-My need for this is because we are a consulting company which bills hourly for our services. I wanted to avoid the need for an agent to have to update a ticket system and a billing system for a single item of work.
-This is basically a two step process:
- Configure the OTRS agent interface to have new fields for billing entry
- Configure an administrator workstation to be able to report on billing and make modifications to billing entries.
- This procedure requires at least one user to be make direct changes to the OTRS Mysql database. This is obviously a risky ability but can at least be controlled to a limited set of users.
-MySQL must be configure to allow remote connections by which ever user account will be used for the ODBC connection.

[crythias]

I want to point out this: http://forums.otrs.org/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=12546 for people who are using "Time Accounting" to record time.

[dwg]

Thank you!

I wasn't familiar with the Time_Accounting table keeping individual records of time entries. I had incorrectly deduced that it was a cumulative field.

It is still a good excercise for those who want custom or granular control... being able to mark an entry billable or unbillable, adding start/stop times, marking entries as billed at the end of a billing cycle. I am going to look in to reworking my procedure to use the built in "Time units (work units):" field and only add additional fields as noted above.

[kamver]

Hi DWG, I found your PDF document very helpfull for a beginer like me, did you get a time to update your document?