Using RT to track billable work (reposted to unthread)

Jay_R_Ashworth · June 14, 2005, 2:12pm

[ sorry 'bout that ]

I’ve made the sale at the small consulting company for which I do most
of my work to use RT to keep track of it.

And I may have written myself into a corner. :-}

The goal, round these here parts, will be to be able not only to track
real work time, as it does now, but to be able to enter billable time
(which, as anyone who’s ever billed realizes, isn’t always the same
thing) as well as hardware sold, and print up a pretty work order at
the end of each visit, including everything you hadn’t already billed
on a workorder number.

Parts of it can be dealt with with custom fields, I realize, but I
suspect not all, or at least not as cleanly as I’d like.

I can see the broad brushstrokes of how I might implement such a thing,
but I haven’t climbed into the details yet. So:

Has anyone already done it? (And yes, I’d like it to integrate well
with Asset Tracker as well)
If not, does anyone need it?
If so, is there anyone who’s reasonably accomplished at modifying RT
that is interested in working on it with me?

Cheers,
– jra
Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com
Designer Baylink RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274

  If you can read this... thank a system administrator.  Or two.  --me

Jay_R_Ashworth · June 14, 2005, 4:25pm

“Jay R. Ashworth” jra@baylink.com writes:

Has anyone already done it? (And yes, I’d like it to integrate well
with Asset Tracker as well)

If not, does anyone need it?

If so, is there anyone who’s reasonably accomplished at modifying RT
that is interested in working on it with me?

Hi Jay,

I may be interested. The approach that I was planning on taking was to
integrate RT (and Nagios and Asset Tracker and some CRM and … with
Banal:
    http://www.starnix.com/banal/
Banal already does things like retainers, billable vs. actual time billing,
half decent PostScript output, etc.

It has a command line and web interface. The WUI is pretty, erm,
user-unfriendly, though (just raw access to the tables and some canned
reports).

Yeah, that’s mediocre. And for my environment, it’s critical. If I
have to marry another entire codebase (it’s been about 7 in the last 2
years; I’m getting pretty burned out), it would likely be SQL Ledger,
which seems to be picking up pretty good these days…

Hmmm…

Cheers,
– jra
Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com
Designer Baylink RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274

  If you can read this... thank a system administrator.  Or two.  --me

G_Matthew_Rice · June 14, 2005, 4:26pm

“Jay R. Ashworth” jra@baylink.com writes:

Has anyone already done it? (And yes, I’d like it to integrate well
with Asset Tracker as well)

If not, does anyone need it?

If so, is there anyone who’s reasonably accomplished at modifying RT
that is interested in working on it with me?

Hi Jay,

I may be interested. The approach that I was planning on taking was to
integrate RT (and Nagios and Asset Tracker and some CRM and … with
Banal:

    http://www.starnix.com/banal/

Banal already does things like retainers, billable vs. actual time billing,
half decent PostScript output, etc.

It has a command line and web interface. The WUI is pretty, erm,
user-unfriendly, though (just raw access to the tables and some canned
reports).

Banal is probably better called a Practice Management System. I was going to
cut out the ticket/helpdesk stuff from banal and integrate it with RT.

If you’d like to talk about it, send me a note.

Regards,
g. matthew rice matt@starnix.com starnix, toronto, ontario, ca
phone: 647.722.5301 x242 gpg id: EF9AAD20
http://www.starnix.com professional linux services & products

Chuck_Colby · June 14, 2005, 5:04pm

I’d be very interested in seeing RT/BANAL integration.

Chuck Colby
chuck@rnoc.netOn Tuesday 14 June 2005 09:26, G. Matthew Rice wrote:

If you’d like to talk about it, send me a note.

Chuck_Colby · June 14, 2005, 5:03pm

“Jay R. Ashworth” jra@baylink.com writes:

Has anyone already done it? (And yes, I’d like it to integrate well
with Asset Tracker as well)

If not, does anyone need it?

If so, is there anyone who’s reasonably accomplished at modifying RT
that is interested in working on it with me?

Hi Jay,

I may be interested. The approach that I was planning on taking was to
integrate RT (and Nagios and Asset Tracker and some CRM and … with
Banal:
    http://www.starnix.com/banal/
Banal already does things like retainers, billable vs. actual time billing,
half decent PostScript output, etc.

It has a command line and web interface. The WUI is pretty, erm,
user-unfriendly, though (just raw access to the tables and some canned
reports).

Banal is probably better called a Practice Management System. I was going
to cut out the ticket/helpdesk stuff from banal and integrate it with RT.

If you’d like to talk about it, send me a note.

Regards,

Joop · June 15, 2005, 10:46am

“Jay R. Ashworth” jra@baylink.com writes:

Has anyone already done it? (And yes, I’d like it to integrate well
with Asset Tracker as well)

If not, does anyone need it?

If so, is there anyone who’s reasonably accomplished at modifying RT
that is interested in working on it with me?

Hi Jay,

I may be interested. The approach that I was planning on taking was to
integrate RT (and Nagios and Asset Tracker and some CRM and … with
Banal:
    http://www.starnix.com/banal/

Another that might be more easily understood and modified:

http://www.achievo.org

They have a demo and extending the system is indeed a matter of a couple
of lines per module, ofcourse depending on how you want to add, only
drawback might be that it is written in PHP and not Perl.
My plans are, partly implemented in both Achievo and RT, to integrate RT
and Achievo and so have a tight integration between project
managment/projects and problems/tickets/assets/documentation.

Feel free to ask about Achievo and what my plans are.

Joop

Joop van de Wege JoopvandeWege@mococo.nl

Ahalya_Nathan · June 22, 2005, 1:04pm

Hi all,
I get this error…can someone tell what is going on since i am new to RT
and really seems strange as to what could be going wrong since i haven’t
changed anything.

X RT Error

Could not load ticket 1169

Regards,
Ahalya Nathan
Senior Programmer / Analyst
Information Technology, Metropolitan Utilities District
(402) 449-8218 phone
(402) 449-8131 fax
ahalya_nathan@mudnebr.com

Angelo_Turetta · June 22, 2005, 1:44pm

Ahalya_Nathan@mudnebr.com wrote:

Hi all,
I get this error…can someone tell what is going on since i am new to RT
and really seems strange as to what could be going wrong since i
haven’t changed anything.

X <http://webtlh01.mudnebr.com/Ticket/Display.html?id=1169#>*
**RT Error * * ** *
Could not load ticket 1169

I had this same problem with PostgreSql and Apache2/mod_perl2(2.0rc4)

Be sure you have DBI-Pg >=1.41, then switch to mod_perl2 2.0 release or
to FastCGI.

Angelo Turetta

Stephen_Turner · June 22, 2005, 1:56pm

At Wednesday 6/22/2005 09:04 AM, Ahalya_Nathan@mudnebr.com wrote:

Hi all,
I get this error…can someone tell what is going on since i am new to RT
and really seems strange as to what could be going wrong since i haven’t
changed anything.

<http://webtlh01.mudnebr.com/Ticket/Display.html?id=1169#>X RT Error
Could not load ticket 1169

Ahalya,

Ther error message just means there’s no ticket with the specified ID. The
HTML in your email makes it hard to tell what’s going on - it looks like
you specified ticket id as “1169” - could you post the exact URL you
requested to get this error?

Steve

Using RT to track *billable* work (reposted to unthread)

Using RT to track billable work (reposted to unthread)