How JIRA Service Desk Can Make Your Finance Team Even Better

They already have software for managing their core tasks of tracking revenue and expenses. They’re not an IT team. Technically, they’re not a service team. So why would we be recommending JIRA Service Desk for your finance team? Because in the end, every team is a service team and JIRA makes it easy to provide better service.

Finance serves both internal and external customers. Along with making sure vendors (and staff!) get paid, Finance has to deal with some small processes that can end up taking up large amounts of time. Consider things like collecting the bank details for new employees and vendors, setting up petty cash floats and managing who has purchasing authority on the office stationery account. Those kinds of processes tend to produce a plethora of emails, attached PDF forms and follow-up phone calls that take a lot of staff time to manage. JIRA Service Desk can make handling those processes more streamlined and efficient, freeing up your Finance team to do more important things — like find ways to save money for your organization.

The same features that make JSD a great tool for IT teams can help Finance teams manage their requests:

• Queues make it easy to direct tasks to the designated staff member and to ensure that the highest priority items get attended to first
• JIRA’s end to end issue tracking makes sure that there is always a record of who did what- something that will make auditors happy
• You can set JSD requests to require manager approval — a great feature for ensuring compliance with policies and spending limits
• Team leaders can use JSD metrics to see how often specific requests types occur and how much time is needed to resolve them (and to notice if anything unusual is occurring)
• Anyone associated with an issue can check its real time status which will reduce phone calls emails and other interruptions

JIRA Forms for Finance

The challenge is that Finance needs to collect different pieces of information than IT. They’re not interested in what browser you’re using, but what expense code you’re using. You have several options in adapting JSD for your Finance team. One is to ask and hope that people include the needed information in the Description field. That’s a bit of a gamble. Or you could create custom fields for the information the Finance team needs. The disadvantage is that you could end up with a spaghetti plate of custom fields, screens and configurations which are difficult to manage and can eventually have a negative impact on performance. Another option is to attach a form to the JIRA request — a good solution, but one that requires jumping through some hoops and using third-party integration. Finally, there’s the ProForma add-on, which empowers teams to create and deploy forms directly from within JIRA.

The ProForma add-on comes with a library of ready to use, purpose-built forms and process templates, including a suite of templates created specifically for Finance teams. Multiple forms can be attached to an issue and any form can be easily customized to fit your organization’s needs. The flexibility and efficiency of using ProForma and JIRA Service Desk is bound to make your Finance team happy. And if the people who control the money are happy, isn’t that good for everyone?

Originally published at www.thinktilt.com.