Auto-Generate Developer Invoices & Compliance Reminders with Jira and Gmail

📘 Description

This automation streamlines developer billing and compliance tracking by integrating Jira, Gmail, and n8n into a single intelligent workflow.
It fetches all project issues from Jira, calculates logged hours per team member, identifies missing time entries, and automatically generates professional invoice summaries — complete with text attachments — which are then emailed to each developer.
The system ensures no time logs are missed, billing remains accurate, and finance teams receive transparent, auditable records — all without manual follow-ups.

⚙️ What This Workflow Does (Step-by-Step)

🟢 When Clicking ‘Execute Workflow’
Starts the entire billing and compliance cycle manually or on schedule.

📋 Fetch All Project Issues with Time Data
Retrieves all Jira issues across projects, including:

• Time spent (seconds → hours)
• Assignee, project, sprint, and status info
• Priority and issue summaries
• This serves as the foundation for billing calculations and compliance checks.

📊 Aggregate Hours by Team Member
Groups issues by assignee and calculates total hours logged per person.
Outputs per-user data with:

• Name & email
• Total logged hours
• Full issue breakdown (status, sprint, priority)
• Forms the core dataset for both invoice creation and reminder logic.

⚠️ Identify Issues with Missing Time Logs
Scans aggregated data to find issues where time = 0 hours.
Generates HTML reminders with:

• Table of unlogged issues (key, summary, sprint, status)
• Personalized note urging time entry completion
• Only sends reminders to users who actually missed logs.
• Prevents manual follow-up and ensures billing accuracy.

💰 Generate Invoice Summary with Text Attachment
Creates text-based invoice documents for each user with logged hours.
Includes:

• Itemized issue breakdowns
• Hourly rate (default: $50/hr)
• Total hours & billing amount
• Auto-generated timestamp
• Exports invoices as text attachments (Invoice_{Assignee}.txt) in base64.

🔗 Combine Reminder & Invoice Data Streams
Merges invoice data and reminder data into one unified stream, ensuring:

• All users (with or without logged hours) are processed
• Emails contain correct context and attachments
• Enables complete communication coverage in a single workflow.

🔧 Reconcile JSON & Binary Attachments

• Smartly merges JSON email metadata and binary invoice files post-merge.
• Handles complex data cases (missing binary or JSON) using fallback logic.
• Guarantees each email has a valid recipient and invoice attachment.

📧 Send Invoices & Reminders to Team
Sends personalized emails to each developer with:

• Subject: project name
• Body: hours summary & reminder message
• Attachment: invoice text file (if available)
• Emails are automatically delivered via Gmail with audit trails.

🧩 Prerequisites

Jira Software Cloud API credentials
Gmail OAuth2 connection
Configured hourly billing rate (default: $50/hr)
Active n8n instance (self-hosted or cloud)

💡 Key Benefits

✅ Eliminates manual invoice generation
✅ Ensures accurate time tracking & compliance
✅ Sends automated reminders for missing hours
✅ Provides transparent, auditable billing communication
✅ Saves finance & project teams hours of manual effort

👥 Perfect For

• Tech & IT service companies billing by developer hours
• Project managers tracking time compliance
• Finance teams ensuring timely invoicing
• Agencies managing multiple sprint-based projects