Add a "client" custom field and allow grouping/billing by client

[Colin Guthrie]

If you do work for multiple clients you may want to bill independently or a set times rather than using a global billing date.

Perhaps I'm missing something but this would seem fairly difficult at the moment.

[Russ Tyndall]

Col,

We have noodled with the idea of a work-type field to allow arbitrarily different types of work with a different interpretation for each (over time, rush charges, etc).

It sounds, in your case however, that you might just want to run a trac instance for each project (this is how we use trac in our office). This corresponds to each svn repository as well (we run all of our separate projects out of separate repos). You should also be able to accomplish this if you make components or milestones the field you put clients in (as there are already reports to group by those fields).

Another option is to just add this custom field yourself (very easy to do via trac config). Then modify all of the reports to group by that field as opposed / in addition to component / milestones.

As for separate bill dates, there is no way to tag a given date with any information (again, each of our trac instances operates for a single client so there was never any thought of multiple billing cycles overlapping in a single trac instance). To solve this I would suggest keeping a wikipage / file of bill dates and just filling out the text box with that date when necessary.

If you check the browser:timingandestimationplugin/trunk/scripts folder in this repository there are some scripts to help manage running queries against a directory full of trac instances (on my computer /var/trac/). This is actually how we run billing as opposed to using the reports provided.

Hope this helps,

Russ

[Colin Guthrie]

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Unf. I can't run separate Tracs as we work on a common codebase for multiple clients - kind of like a community project but we (at least try to) do it commercially!

I'll maybe see if I can play at modifying the reports accordingly and see how things go with regards to billing dates.

Thanks again.

[Russ Tyndall]

This is accomplished via custom fields and new reports as discussed over email. See User manual for how to add reports to the management page.

[Colin Guthrie]

For anyone who finds this closed ticket:

As of today the latest versions of TimingAndEstimationPlugin and ClientsPlugin will combine to accomplish this task exactly. :D Note tho' that ClientsPlugin will require a small patch to Trac itself to operate correctly, see it's homepage for more details.