Turn Jira billable hours into a centralized project budget visibility

Jira time tracking is useful for the PMO and project managers but those logged hours don’t automatically explain project cost or profitability. That’s why linking the connection of time data with project budget inside Jira is pivotal. Discover how Jira worklogs can be transformed into real project cost visibility, forgetting about spreadsheets or manual reporting.

We all have been there:
- Your teams logs their time in Jira
- Great
- Now what? What’s the point of making your team going through such annoying task? Are you taking advantage of that piece of data? And here it comes the real question:

- Do you actually know how much is that time logging costing you? No, right? We know… 😉

At the end of every month, someone takes that data, exports it to some other document type (an spreadsheet usually → Check rates per hours → assign them to each person → and manually builds a report for management…

- Wouldn’t be better to see that information by just opening Jira? I mean, start making your life easier…

A centralized dashboard in Jira could be answering "How much is X project costing so far?" 

But the reality is that for some teams the answer usually is “give me a couple of hours,” or even worse “Let’s wait until Friday.” The struggle is real!

Another perspective could be:

From the budgeting side, when the project manager wants to find out “If X project still remains within budget?," and the answers is messy... of course, because the information it’s scattered. Same problem, different point of view.

The real problem is that time tracking exists, and budget management as well, but both are slow, manual, inefficient, and they're not connected and siloed 

•    Worklogs are captured but not translated into costs.
•    Billable and non-billable time are not always separated.
  
•    Project budgets are planned but not compared with real effort.
•    Finance teams are basically out of the tool, and the equation in general.
•    Project Managers finds out that they are out of budgets, right after. 
•    And ladies and gentlemen. This is not budget control. This is anarchy in the Jira!

What should you be doing instead?

Logging time in Jira shouldn’t be the end of the process in the tool. It should be just the beginning. 

For a better cost tracking of billable and non-billable work the following workflow should be followed: 

1. A team member logs time using a solution such as Timetracker.
   
   
   
2. The time is assigned to the task “In Progress.”
   
   
3. The worklog is now a billable tasks that can be linked to the project of interest. 
   
   
4. You bring Budgety for Jira into the equation and create a budget linked to the tasks and Spaces where the time is being tracked.
   
   
   
5. Within the budget create a cost associated to the person which time costs are wanted to be tracked, among other details, ensuring this cost is based on logged time, and save the cost.
   
   
   
6. The logged time will be calculated against those cost rules specified.
   
   
7. The project budget will automatically show the total costs of the time logged, and it will discount it from the overall budget
   1. You will even have the opportunity to compare it with a forecasted budget and calculate variance. The possibilities are endless.
      
      
   

Now you have two billable hours attached to a specific task (or Space) with a cost impact visible in the project budget.

It gets even better… if have Projectrak (alongside Budgety, both part of the PMO Collection for Jira) you can display a list with all your projects (Spaces) and, alongside, all the budgets associated to those projects with just a quick look, besides watching Status, Priority, relevant dates, stakeholders, and every other relevant information.

So, what’s the overall benefit from using a time tracking solution connected to Budgety for Jira?

With Timetracker you can capture the time invested in the correspondent task (if you log somewhere by mistake, that’s on you. This is not magic. Yet!)

With it you can log the time based on different views: a timeline view, a calendar view, or directly in the task (if the Jira Admin didn't hide the field); also you get extra context such as create tags to categorize work by activity type, differentiate billable tags to separate what generates revenue and what not, create teams, and get reports.

By adding Budgety to this equation, you get the financial point of view. 

By using Budgety you can manage project budgets, defined planned and forecasted amounts, set dates, classify costs according to Enterprise standards, monitor spend, and even establish rates per role/person (only available in the Advanced Edition).

⚠️One of the key action is linking the task on which time was logged to a Budgety budget⚠️

After being sure the connection is solid, is downhill from there. You just start filling the missing details by defining:

•    Cost name.
•    Define if the cost is associated with logged hours or not.
  
•    Hourly amount rate.
•    Responsible person.
•    Dates.
•    CAPEX or OPEX.
•    Direct or Indirect cost.
•    Custom categories.

This is useful for every team to stay informed by just taking a look:

•    For project managers: Yo have all the information centralized and available at a simple sight.
  
  
•    Finance teams: They get more context, what, when, how, whom… it’s all there.
  
  
•    Jira Admins: They can focus on other matters, forgetting about custom reports on this matter.
  
  
•    The PMO: They get better governance and delivery from a wider perspective, being able to drill as deep as they need to.

In definitive. Jira time tracking is useful but tracking it just by the sakes of doing it doesn’t help anyone. Connecting billable (or not) worklogs with budget data turns it into project cost visibility and project profitability as a consequence.