Each quarter I do my VAT (Value Added Tax) return. This is the tax that gets added on to each purchase in the UK. It's a little reminder that I must do my billing. Honestly, I have so much fun doing the work I do, that I forget to bill people sometimes!

Using my current technology, it's a little long winded so I thought I'd document how I do it, to remind me to find a way to do it better. Obviously this method is going to be terribly geeky, but hay - I am who I am :)

All my time accounting is handled by MantisBT which is the issue tracker I use. I wrote the current implementation of the billing feature so I thought I'd better use that! I have it on good authority that I'm not the only one!

The applications needed for this work are: web browser, PuTTY and Open Office, so load then in now!

1. Login to MantisBT.
2. Select Billing from navigation bar.
3. Select the Project you are going to prepare the billing for. The page will automatically reload.
4. Select the data period you are billing for. Leave the Cost as zero.
5. Click Get TimeTracking Information
6. Cut the text in the results page; starting before the first issue identifier and drag down to the end of the time on the last issue line.
7. In PuTTY and jump to you nearest unix box.
8. Load Vi.
9. Paste copied text into Vi's session.
10. Remove all references to my user name.:%s/David Newcomb//
11. Jump to the top of the page.gg
12. From the start of the line create a macro to format the data.qawr,lxJr,0jq
13. Do control+g to get the number of lines. Divide it by 2 then, to give say 20. Then repeat macro for each line: 20@a.
14. Clean up additional spaces::%s/, \([0-9]\)/,\1/
15. Select all the text and paste it into Open Office spread sheet.
16. The Text Import dialogue will appear, so select Separated by Comma and click Ok.
17. Highlight the column containing the time information.
18. Right click and select Format Cells...
19. Set category to Time and choose 13:37 which is HH:MM.
20. Hit Ok and the cells will be changed to the correct format.
21. Select the cell underneath the last time.
22. Enter:=SUM(
23. After the opening bracket the cursor changes so you can select all the cells you want to be in the summation. Hit return when you have finished selecting them.
24. Select the cell again and add the formatting.
25. Now you can cut and paste the report anywhere you like.

I have used some Vi macro's. Take a look at my article Vi's super commands to see an example of how to set up a Vi macro.