Managing and Billing Clients in GitLab
Forgive me if this isn't the right forum/media for this- but it seems as good as any...
We are already using GitLab for version control and CI, but want to see if we could also use it as a servicedesk/support ticket system.
I can see there are feature in the enterprise edition to allow logging of time spent and estimates against issues (and merge requests I think)- so this is a good start.
We also already use a group for each client (company)- so this could also be helpful.
We don't currently, but could easily create users for the client contacts; but at this point I think things get a little tricky. If a client calls to report a problem- we could raise an issue but couldn't assign the client as the originator/requester (only as the "assignee"). At which point they would probably start getting notifications and I don't think it's quite the right...
Similarly, I don't believe there is currently anywhere to enter rates and produce invoices/quotes etc.
Another concern is managing cross project tickets (issues). We have a small team and dozens of clients (groups) and hundreds of projects. I think it could be very challenging if there isn't a way to view all issues across our entire GitLab instance.
Is anyone doing anything like this at the moment?
I hope this can kick off some interesting discussion- thanks!
## Billing details
We have `default_rate` per organization. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/87529+ introduces `billing_rate` per category. Based on this discussion (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/87529#note_950088855), a plausible order of precedence could be `billing_rate (category) -> organization_user_rate -> default_rate (organization) -> user_rate`. This way the billing calculation should be the more flexible as possible.
epic