Want to learn the ins and outs of time tracking in Jira to better estimate, manage resources, and budget for your Jira projects? This guide is for you.
Time tracking in Jira sounds simple. But, it’s more extensive than you think, and getting a grasp of everything at a glance is no easy feat. In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know to master time tracking in Jira.
To break it down, here’s what we’ll go over:
- What is time tracking in Jira?
- How to set up time tracking in Jira.
- Extending Jira’s time tracking capabilities with apps.
- The best practices for time tracking in Jira
Let’s start by understanding the basics of time tracking in Jira to kick things off.
Understanding the basics of Jira time tracking
Time tracking is a way of measuring the time your teams spend on tasks and projects. In Jira, it involves:
- Setting an estimated time when you expect your teams to work on an individual issue.
- Having your teams log how long they spend working on specific issues.
When working on projects, teams focus on delivering value. As a result, time tracking is usually viewed as secondary to a project’s needs, causing it to fall down the pecking order. But, as a project manager looking to improve your team’s efficiency and productivity, you can’t afford to ignore it.
Here’s why.
Why is time tracking in Jira important?
Time tracking affects both the planning and execution phases of your projects in Jira, making it key to their success. Doing it effectively will improve how you plan for your projects and boost your team’s productivity as they execute them.
At the beginning of a project, there are a lot of unknowns, and you could struggle with coming up with realistic estimates for your project’s timelines. Time tracking can help you with this. You can refer to previous time tracking data (for example, how long teams spent on specific issues) to set realistic deadlines for similar work.
Planning aside, time tracking can help you to charge your clients accurately. You can track billable hours and share this time tracking report with your accounts team. This team can then create an invoice to charge clients for your services.
Whether you’re managing Waterfall or Agile projects you’ll need to track the time spent working on them. With that in mind, let’s see how to set up and track time in Jira.
How to set up and track time in Jira
Jira has two built-in issue fields that enable you to track time spent working on your project’s issues:
The original estimate field – As the name suggests, this is where you set an estimated time you expect developers to work on
The time tracking field – In this field, developers will log the hours spent working on an issue.
These fields are visible for all issues if you’re in a company-managed project. But if you’re in a team-managed project, you’ll have to add them yourself.
How to enable time tracking fields in your Jira issues
Adding time tracking fields to your Jira issues is the same as adding any other field to them. To do this, go to Project Settings > Issue Types and select an issue to which you want to add these fields.On the right side panel, search for the ‘Original estimate’ and ‘Time tracking’ fields, drag them, and drop them where you want them to appear on the issue. Once done, click the Save button.
Repeat this for any other issue type you want to add these fields to. That’s it.
Before your teams can start to log hours spent working, there are a few more settings you’ll want to configure first.
Configuring time tracking settings
Jira offers basic time tracking settings that can help you configure this feature to suit how your teams work. You can set:
- Working hours per day and days per week.
- The time display format.
- The default unit (minutes, days, or weeks).
After all this is set up, teams can now log time spent working on issues and you can track their entries.
Logging actions and tracking time in Jira
To start tracking the time spent working on issues, you’ll first need to set an estimated time. You can do this when creating a new issue or editing an existing one. Just open the issue, click on the Original estimate field, and set the initial estimate.
How to log working hours in Jira
As developers work, they’ll be able to log the time spent working on issues. All they have to do is open the issue they’re working on, click on the time tracking field, and log the time spent working on the issue that day.
Jira’s built-in time tracker will automatically subtract the time logged from the original estimate to show you the time remaining. As they log time, developers can add comments to update you on their progress.
If you’re managing multiple projects or have tens to hundreds of developers in your team, tracking time, one issue after another can get tedious. Fortunately, you take this up a level with Jira time tracking reports.
How to report time tracking information in Jira
Jira has several time tracking reports that give you high-level visibility into how teams spend time on tasks. These include:
- Time tracking report – the amount of issues, the estimate, and the amount of time remaining.
- User workload report – what specific users are working on and the time they have left.
- Version workload report – time remaining for all open issues for a specific version of a project.
You can access these for the reports section of your Jira project.
NOTE: You can access these reports only from a company-managed project. If you’re on a team-managed project, you’ll have to find some other way to display these reports. But, don’t fret! This is what we’ll cover in the next section.
Improving time management in Jira with the top tools for time tracking
Earlier on we touched on how Jira’s built-in time tracking features are pretty basic. If you solely depend on them, you’ll be leaving yourself short.
Thankfully Jira is extensible, so you aren’t limited to what it offers by default. There are several time tracking apps in the Atlassian Marketplace that you can use to improve your time tracking experience and outcomes.
They include:
But for this guide, we want to focus on Timesheets by Tempo. Not just because it is in the Atlassian Marketplace spotlight but also because it adds so much to Jira’s default time tracking capabilities.
Understand how your teams’ time is spent in detail with Timesheets by Tempo
This is the number one time tracking app for Jira and with good reasons. It equips you to track time for various reasons including reporting, invoicing, and accounting. When you set it up correctly, it allows you to collect and report time tracking data for these purposes easily.
What makes Timesheets stand out?
It has a simple calendar interface for logging time. Developers can log time similar to the way they would do it in Jira by default, but here they can see weekly time tracking progress at a glance. What’s more, to update time they can drag and drop time logs, duplicate them, expand or contract them, and so on.
Timesheets tightly integrates with Jira. When you install it, it becomes your time tracking provider. Meaning it will modify the time tracking fields for you without needing you to lift a finger. On top of this, it has advanced time tracking settings to give you more control over this process.
Timesheets is the best tool for tracking time spent working on issues in Jira. It is best placed to help you implement the best practices we’ll discuss in the next section.
Jira time tracking best practices
Having a great tool like Timesheets is only half the job. You need to know how to use it to implement the best practices for time tracking in Jira. Apart from the standard stuff like creating time tracking policies here are some best practices to consider as you track time on Jira.
Create different workload schemes depending on your working schedules
If you have teams or team members working on different schedules, for example, part-time and full-time, you should create different workload schemes for them. This way their time logs won’t clash with each other.
Timesheets have staff settings that enable you to create part-time, full-time, contract-based, and internship workload schemes. To create a workload scheme you can name it, describe it, and set the number of hours
After creating these schemes, you can freely move different members of from one scheme to another depending on their work schedule.
Set up logging reminders
Teams can get completely absorbed in their work and forget to log working hours. This can be a disaster when you want data on billable hours. To prevent this from happening, you need to set up reminders that notify members to log their work periodically.
Timesheet’s scheduler allows you to create a custom reminder schedule for your teams. You can choose to notify all users or just those that are late. Also, you can choose to send reminders weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.
Set up approvals by managers or team leaders
Although this is optional, we highly recommend you set up approvals for your logged time data. Approvals give you more accurate time tracking data because logged time will be reviewed and approved by a manager.
You can set this up from the Period Configuration settings in Timesheets. Like with reminders, you can have approvals weekly or monthly. Once teams submit their time sheets, these will be forwarded to a team manager for approval.
Create logged time reports
This is quite obvious but we wanted to mention it to show you how easy it is to generate a time tracking report with Timesheets and how useful these reports can be. First things first, you can generate different types of reports including:
- Logged time reports.
- A report to compare the planned time and the actual time.
- Cost and revenues.
- Structure report.
In just two clicks, you can create any report you want. You can filter the report by team, roles, accounts, etc., and get a more precise report.
Once your report is ready, you can export it with your accounts team to create invoices or with stakeholders to share progress.
Track time in your Jira projects today
Time tracking is something you’ll have to do as a project manager in Jira. It is a powerful tool that will improve how efficiently you deliver current and future projects. Jira has default time tracking tools that set a solid foundation for managing time while using it to manage your projects.
But, they aren’t enough. To realize the true value of time tracking, you need to use dedicated time tracking tools like Timesheets. Timesheets augments Jira’s native time tracking features and brings in so much more. With Timesheets, you can track time for several reasons such as reporting, invoicing, and planning.
Track time in your Jira projects today with the help of dedicated tools and the best practices we’ve shared in this guide.
