How can we turn a task's status from 'To Do' to 'In Progress' automatically when we bill time to the task?

[Nick Ying]

Often we bill time to a task and forget to change the task status from 'To do' to 'In Progress' and it becomes pretty annoying. 

So just wondering if it is possible to turn a task to in progress automatically when time is billed? Or alternatively, is it possible to disable the time billing function until a task is turned to in progress?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'd move the "bill time" option into a workflow action, so that users have to go trhough to "in progress" in order to do the "billing"

[Nick Ying]

Hi Nic,

Thanks for your reply.

Can you pls elaborate on how to do this in Jira?

Our staff members normally bill time by clicking log work button. Do you mean it is possible to hide this button until a task/sub-task is turned into in progress?

Thanks very much!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'd assumed that "billing time" was a different process than "logging work"

You could, if you were on Server JIRA, find/write a listener that could pick up "work logged" and issue the "start progress" transition if it were the first one.

But for Cloud, and for simplicity, I think you've hit on the easier option with the "possible to hide button" idea.  You set up your permission scheme to allow users to log work as normal.  Then you edit the workflow.  Assuming you have a really simple one like Open -> In Progress -> Done, and a user should not log time when it is open, you can add a workflow property  to the Open status that removes that permission while the issue is in that status (I think you'd want jira.permission.work=denied for this one)