GitHub Time Tracking and Invoicing Integration

Published Dec 06, 2012 Updated Mar 18, 2014

Would you like to track time for GitHub issues and pull-requests easily and receive nice looking project reports or even create invoices for your clients with one click? We do.

Because we use GitHub for almost all project development and issue tracking we wanted to connect it with a system for recording working time and providing billing - to have a possibility to present our clients with reports showing the time spend on individual tickets.

Therefore we developed an extension for web browser which adds into GitHub one-click time tracking and connects the time reports with the estimated project budget and possibility for direct invoicing. With this blog post we are releasing it for other developers, so others can use this system too.

To add into GitHub the one-click time tracking functionality integrated with all Issues or Pull requests pages, follow these steps:

• Register the free Harvest account. They have various pricing plans, you get a full 30 day trial which turns automatically into the FREE FOREVER plan with 2 active projects, 4 active clients and unlimited invoicing. It runs just fine, because you can archive the inactive projects, of course the paid project has another advantages. With this sign-up link you may even get discount if you later on decide for a different then free plan: Register the free Harvest account
• Install the extension / add-on for your web browser, which adds into GitHub the integration: Activate Google Chrome Extensionor Activate Firefox Add-On
• Whenever you visit the issues page on GitHub a new button appears next to the #ticket-number
• With one click you can start to track the time. The dialog also shows the sum of time already spent by you on this ticket.
• Harvest provides great project reports - with links back to the GitHub tickets.
• You can track a contract progress based on the estimated time/costs limits, which is very helpful. The system can also send people reminder to fill the time sheets online.
• It is also possible to directly create nice looking invoices and estimates or track late payments.

Enjoy!

Note: the time can be of course tracked by other means, such as with the github commit hooks, on the desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux GTK), or command line or with the mobile apps (iPhone, Android) and directly and directly from Gmail.