How to Automate Time Logging Without Affecting Technician Reporting Integrity

[krzysztof_franczak]

Hi everyone,
I'm currently dealing with a challenge and would appreciate any advice.

We provide Managed Services for multiple clients. As you know, many tasks can be automated and run in the background thanks to tools and economies of scale. However, we still need to report back to clients based on pre-agreed time allocations. For example, we might contract with a client for 1 hour of IT environment monitoring per week. In practice, the process is fully automated, and if no alerts are raised, the technician may spend only 5 minutes—or even zero—just to confirm everything is working fine.
Despite that, we still need to report the full 1 hour in our service report.

Currently, I’m handling this via a Jira Work Management automation:
When a task is closed, it checks if the Time Logged is less than the Time Estimated. If so, it automatically logs the missing time under the user who closed the ticket.

This works for now, but it has a significant drawback:

1. Time is logged under the technician's name, which distorts reports about their actual daily activity and time usage.

---

My questions are:

• Is there a better way to handle this time logging, ideally without impacting individual users’ worklogs?

• How can I report logged time to the client in this kind of scenario in a clean and transparent way?

---

Additional challenge:

I'd also like to anonymize the names in worklog reports, replacing them with job roles like “admin” or “service desk”.
In such a case, I imagine time could be logged under a technical user like "Automation for Jira", but in the final report I could still reference the actual technician or display a job title instead of a name.

The challenge is: how to implement this technically?
Do you have any recommendations or proven approaches?

Thanks in advance for any tips!

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @krzysztof_franczak 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

1. Time is logged under the technician's name, which distorts reports about their actual daily activity and time usage.

• Is there a better way to handle this time logging, ideally without impacting individual users’ worklogs?

For the rule that logs time, what have you specified as the Rule Actor? The time should be logged as work done by the user specified as the Rule Actor. If you don't want the time logged as the technician, then you can set the Rule Actor to "Automation for Jira". Then the logged time will not impact the technician's logged time.

• How can I report logged time to the client in this kind of scenario in a clean and transparent way?

How are you currently generating reports for the client about time worked for them?

I'd also like to anonymize the names in worklog reports, replacing them with job roles like “admin” or “service desk”.
In such a case, I imagine time could be logged under a technical user like "Automation for Jira", but in the final report I could still reference the actual technician or display a job title instead of a name.

Jira does not provide that sort of sophisticated time reporting natively. Are you willing to consider acquisition of a third party app to achieve your requirements?