If your team spends their day working in Jira, then it makes sense for them to use Jira to track their time. Time tracking allows you to see how much time is being spent on given issues, epics or projects and use that information to better manage your resources. Of course, time tracking can also be used to produce timesheets so that you can pay the team that’s doing all that great work. However, you may need options that go beyond what’s natively included in Jira.
How Jira Time Tracking Apps / Plugins Work
While Jira does allow users to create worklogs on issues, it’s native time tracking functionality is quite limited. Not only do the worklogs have to be manually created, but you are stuck with the worklog screen Jira provides. You can’t add your own custom fields- say for tracking billable hours, cost centers or clients.
The options for extracting the data that’s been entered are even more limited. Jira’s native time tracking is, not surprisingly, used to populate Jira reports such as Sprint burndown charts, Velocity report, Cumulative flow diagram, etc. You can also use JQL to query some information (author, date, comment, group and role) about the worklogs, but JQL always return a list of issues. It doesn’t give you an easy way to produce a timesheet or configure your own reports.
How Jira Time Tracking Apps Track Time
For these reasons, many teams choose to use a time tracking app. Jira time tracking apps have different ways of tracking time, such as manually creating worklogs which have configured to more fields than natively available in Jira; starting and stopping a timer on an issue and creating worklogs from Google or Outlook Calendar events. Unique in the Atlassian Marketplace, Clockwork for Jira also includes no-touch time tracking with worklogs being calculated based on the issue status and assignee’s working hours.
How Jira Time Tracking Apps Report Time
Once the worklogs are captured, the ability to slice and dice the data into custom reports is one of the key advantages of using a Jira time tracking app. The app should provide useful reports for multiple use cases, such as:
- Allowing project managers to compare estimated time to actuals to better understand their team’s capacity
- Ensuring needed data is provided for payroll by making it easy to spot (and nudge) team members who haven’t completed their timesheets
- Expediting billing and invoicing with customizable worklog attributes (billable/nonbillable hours, customer, cost center, etc.) and cost and rate tracking reports
It’s also helpful if reports are exportable, and easily accessible via a dashboard gadget.
Compare Jira Time Tracking Apps / Plugins
We know that small teams often work within small budgets. That’s why we’ve created two great Jira time tracking options for those who don’t want to pay for features they don’t need:
Clockwork Pro for Jira Time Tracking and Timesheets
Did you know that Clockwork Pro for Jira is FREE for teams in the 0-10 user tier? At that price, why not try it today!
Clockwork Lite Time Tracker –Time Tracking and Timesheets
Got more than 10 users? Try Clockwork Lite to enjoy effortless Jira time tracking at an awesomely affordable price.
