⏱️Easy Time Logging and Reviewing in Jira: How to Never Miss a Minute

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Keeping track of work time in Jira is highly important. Whether you're an employee who tries to stay organized or a manager who needs to have a clear picture of how exactly the time is spent by your team. For team members, timekeeping prevents task forgetting, facilitates reporting, and enables improved planning. To the leads and managers, it provides actual visibility of progress, workloads, and where help might be required.

Still, the necessity of tracking time in Jira often feels like an additional task on top of everything else.

In this article, we will explore how to make time logging a simple and routine process, and how managers will benefit from improved data.

Why Time Tracking Matters for Employees

Time tracking is not only about reports, but it also keeps you on track with your own work:

• Be organized: Be aware of how you spend your time and plan in advance.
• Never forget things: Record small jobs and meetings before you forget them.
• Be reasonable: Managers will know your true workload when you have clear time logs.
• Feel in control: Personal timesheets allow you to see your weekly progress.
• Easy reporting: No more guessing when to report hours.

Why Time Tracking Matters for PMs and Team Leads

Accurate time tracking will enable you to be a more effective leader, plan more efficiently, and work within your budget:

• Get the big picture: Have an overview of the time spent across the tasks and projects of your team.
• Identify problems in time: Detect delays, backlogs, or overloads before they become out of control.
• Better planning: Plan using actual time data to estimate work and resources.
• Encourage your staff: Balance workloads to make them reasonable.
• Report confidently: Provide transparent reports to stakeholders or clients.
• Make correct invoices: Quickly invoice customers depending on employee time and hourly rates.

The Built-In Jira Time Tracking Functionality and Its Limits

Jira is equipped with a simple time tracker that allows users to log their work on work items manually. It is helpful in tracking time and estimating the remaining work. It is possible to log working hours, leave a comment, and view a time tracking panel on every work item.

Jira's built-in time tracking can work for some simple needs, but for many teams, it is pretty limited and inflexible. 

🎯Capabilities of Jira native time tracking:

• Manually log work on every work item.
• View the spent and remaining estimates for each task.
• Track time per user.

🚫Limitations:

• No personal timesheet view or calendar view.
• There is no evident weekly/monthly time summary.
• Challenging to do bulk editing and review of time entries.
• No built-in team or project reporting.
• Lacks support for hourly rates and cost tracking.

To the individual user, maintaining consistency can be difficult without a centralized view. For managers, obtaining team-wide time insights or client billing information typically requires extra tools or manual effort.

This is why so many teams use apps such as Time & Cost Tracker for Jira to have the visibility, structure, and reporting they genuinely need.

How Time & Cost Tracker for Jira App Supports You

Time & Cost Tracker for Jira fills the gaps that native Jira time tracking cannot fill on its own. Using it allows for easy recording of time and provides a clear view of the big picture.

👩‍💻 For employees:

• Log time directly from the work item screen, eliminating the need to switch tabs.

• Get an overview of your week or month with a personal timesheet.

• Edit or delete time entries easily if something changes.

👨‍💼 For PMs and team leads:

• View team-wide timesheets that are filtered by user, project, or date. The example of a timesheet filtered by projects: 

• Generate detailed cost and time reports.
• Set hourly rates and automatically estimate the project cost.
• Export reports for clients, finance, or internal review.

Time & Cost Tracker makes time tracking a transparent, organized, and valuable aspect of your daily routine, whether you're recording your day or managing a team.

🧑‍💻The app is available on Atlassian Marketplace: Time & Cost Tracker for Jira ⏱️📊

Summing Up

It is simpler to track time when it is part of your workflow. Although Jira provides built-in tools that support the basics, it does not offer personal views, reporting, and billing. The Time & Cost Tracker will complete what you require, including basic time logging and individual timesheets, as well as team reports and cost control.