Extracting Billing Reports - Eclipse/BIRT

[oneobserver]

Now that I have implemented this as our support tracking tool, I have to find a way to get Billing reports back out of the system by the end of the month. I have been looking at the Open Source project BIRT based on the Eclipse package which is pretty much a freeware version of Crystal Reports (http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/) and is relatively easy to setup. Before I go recreating the wheel on this, has anybody else implemented this using this package (or something similar) and can give me some pointers on how I can accomplish this or pitfalls to avoid?

As some background, we are a small IT consulting firm that works with several companies here in the local area. When we implemented Support Suite, we defined each company that we work with as a seperate Department, and created email queues and rules so any tickets for each company would be isolated into those Departmental Queues. As work is done, our staff enters time worked per ticket, and then at the end of each month or when the ticket is closed, adds a Billing Summary entry. No additional time is added for the Billing Summary entry. What we would like to be able to do is extract for each month for all tickets closed during that month or still open with a Billing Summary the following:

1) The Ticket ID
2) The Department
3) The owner
4) The Billing Summary
5) A summation of the time worked that month on that ticket.

I have several tools that allow me to look at the MySQL database and see all the tables, but what I am missing is how the tables and fields relate to each other. Is there a published schema available that documents this or would somebody be willing to work with me to at least get the parts that I need to extract outlined?

I would be more than willing to document the whole project when done and make it available to either Kayako or the SupportSuite community as a whole. At a bare minimum to those that help get this working...

Thanks!

markh

[JasonWeathersby]

Glad to hear you are looking at BIRT.
I wanted to let you know that BIRT is totally written from the ground up in the Open Source arena. If you need any assistance, or want to make any comments post to the news group and give us your feedback.

Jason
BIRT PMC

[jerdman]

How is BIRT working for you? I created a custom cheduled reporting system and posted all the stuff in this post:
http://forums.kayako.com/showthread....8924#post58924

I would love to compare.