What Features Does Jira’s Native Time Tracking Have?
If you already encountered Jira in your career as a manager, you probably have some knowledge about its capabilities. Unfortunately, in this case Jira does not have much to offer. The tool includes:
- Time tracking for individual employees that are able to create worklogs in the tasks and projects they are assigned to,
- Progress bar in a task window,
- The ability to generate simple timesheets for individuals and hours spent on a project and visualize their work.
Unfortunately, from a service company perspective, these features are not enough. That’s because the Jira is incapable of storing, analyzing and processing information on wages, costs in a project, capacity, or even resource management in general. As a result, it has little value for project management at all.
Fortunately for you, Jira can be integrated with other apps. But what features should they have to be the best Jira time tracking plugins?
What Features Should An ideal Jira time tracking plugin have?
If you are a manager or an executive, you probably often sit in front of a screen trying to make sense of all the tracked hours. Jira reports often can’t help managers fill the gaps in their data analysis, as they only focus on time entries.
An ideal Jira time tracking plugin should fix that. That is because it should cover the entire time tracking process: from resource allocation, to project accounting.
Ideal Features for Jira Cloud Time Tracking App
To do that, the best Jira time tracking tools should have:
- Financial information related to worked time and its impact on the entire project (i.e. billable hours costs of work, overheads, etc.)
- Advanced timesheet tracking with work spending,
- Analysis based on the information from time tracking,
- Advanced reports, including project progress report, budget report and time tracking report for both individual specialists and the entire project,
- Capacity planning tools based on local calendar with public holidays,
- Time off management,
- Custom fields allowing for adding more details to key actions.
Of course, many companies only want to focus on a single tool. That is why additional features you should look for include: resource planning, business intelligence, project accounting, project portfolio management and skill management.
Plugins for Jira Software Timesheet Tracking: Comparision
Fortunately, Jira service management allows for expanding the tool with add ons and plugins that allow employees to log work and track time (and enjoy additional free time, if the process is quick enough). But let’s not focus on the empty words: let’s see which Jira time tracking plugins or apps really have the features and detailed insights we expect them to have.
Best Time Management Plugins For Jira: Ranking
BigTime
If you are working for a service company that is only interested in a comprehensive approach to its operations, BigTime is definitely a choice you should consider.
The tool combines time, resource, project and finance management in a single tool, offering a number of advanced tools covering all the processes a service company may have at its sleeve. Time tracking and monitoring team productivity is not an exception here – and it is not limited to monitoring Jira issues with a seamless integration with Jira Server.
BigTime Features
In BigTime, you can manage time tracking from many different perspectives.
In this tool, you can:
- Import the time data from Jira, combine it with finances and get a complete overview of your operations to streamline key processes,
- Create worklogs from the scratch through manual entry,
- Create new projects, add time estimates, advanced details and custom fields, and manage them as you like it,
- Monitor both non-billable and billable hours, as well as any other overheads impacting your operations,
- Monitor the profitability for people and projects based on wages and fees, for both T&M and Fixed Price projects,
- Create and edit invoices for customers,
- Create timesheets reports showing both plans and their execution,
- Plan the work in a calendar with public holidays, time offs, and capacity,
- Monitor work progress and create advanced reports based on the data from individual specialists’ timesheets.
- Integrate your existing solutions with other marketplace apps, including Jira, Quickbooks, and more.
BigTime Foresight – Other Features
The app also offers a variety of other features, including resource planning, business intelligence, project accounting, project portfolio management and skill management, that you may find helpful in your work.
Sounds like too much to bear? You couldn’t be more wrong. According to the reviews on G2 and Capterra, BigTime Foresight excels in its usability and combines all of its features in a seamless and easily understandable way. As a result, many users claim that they have never used a better time tracking tool before.
Harvest Time Tracking
Harvest is yet another popular tool present on Atlassian Marketplace capable of being integrated with Jira time tracking and expanding its data capabilities for project management purposes. However, the tool may not have everything you look for in such a tool.
As far as the time tracking itself is concerned, Harvest focuses on the most basic type of time tracking – it simply imports the information on the tasks from Jira and lets its users log their time on it. However, the process is lengthy and quite complicated. As a result, it discouraged numerous uses on both G2 and Capterra.
Harvest Time Tracking – Features
Apart from the basic time tracking that allows the employees to log time and work in Jira in the same time, Harvest Time Tracking has a few additional features that supplement its main module. These include:
- partial capacity management (no time off management included),
- basic budgeting and invoices (no overheads included),
- basic time tracking reports (no other reports are available).
However, even though the features are present in the tool, they are drastically limited and they do not cover the majority of use cases for service companies.
Harvest – Other Features
Still, while Harvest has some features that may interest you at first glance, it also has a huge problem that any Jira time tracking user should know about – the tool has enormous issues with integrations. According to Harvest Time Tracking reviews, the majority of customers encountered some problems with them, whether in Jira itself or in particular operating systems.
Tempo Timesheets
Tempo Timesheets is another popular alternative to standard Jira time tracking. However, it comes with significant limitations.
Tempo Timesheets – Time Tracking Features
First of all, Jira Tempo Timesheets focuses on time tracking and analysis only. The tool includes features such as:
- Manual and partially automated time tracking (if user connected its system to a Google/Microsoft calendar, he can log time and track work automatically),
- Timesheets and reports based on the time tracking information,
- Tracking billable and non billable time and creating invoices based on the information about costs and wages,
- Capacity reports for managing both billable hours and free time,
- Information on time offs (no time off management is available).
However, while this list may seem tempting, that is where Tempo Timesheet advantages end. In fact, the features above may also go unnoticed in the app – many users on G2 claim that the software is unintuitive and some options are hard to find.
Tempo Timesheets – Other Features
The tool has no additional features that could help employees track time in their projects, and the ones that are already in the system are strictly limited to time tracking – you cannot use the tool for project management, resource planning or managing time offs, which also have an impact on time tracking. To make things worse, Tempo is capable of providing these features to the users. However, they require a purchase of additional Tempo software – a price not every service company is willing to pay.
Last but not least, Tempo Timesheet may encounter some technical issues that affect the tool as a whole. Some customers claim to have problems with particular features in the software after the updates, while others report problems with integration. As a result, Tempo Timesheet received mixed reviews from the public.
Clockify
Clockify advertises itself as a free Jira time tracking plugin. While this is not entirely the truth (Clockify also has a more advanced paid version), this time tracking app certainly has some time tracking features. But are they enough to fulfill the needs of an average service company?
Cloclify – Time Management Features
Clockify app, whether in its free or paid version, offers a variety of time tracking tools. These include:
- Timesheets with calendar,
- Reports for time tracking,
- Rates, earnings, costs and profits based on the tracked time,
- Project scheduling,
- Basic invoicing.
This list seems to cover a large chunk of the most popular use cases for the service companies. However, with the wide variety of tools come significant problems.
Clockify – Other Features
First of all, many users claim that Clocify has significant problems with its interface. Numerous reviewers found it difficult to use or even locate particular features; others had troubles understanding the software and its capabilities altogether.
Apart from that, Clockify was designed to be a free tool – therefore, it has smaller income it could spend on advancing its technologies. As a result, its features are very limited and are hardly ever perfected, which did not escape the attention of numerous users.
Everhour
Everhour is another common software choice for companies interested in manual timer compatible with Jira. However, does the app really have what it takes to appeal to the service companies?
Everhour – Time Management Features
Let’s take a look at features Everhour offers for those interested in integrating it with Jira time tracking app. The software includes:
- Time tracking,
- Basic billing and budgeting based on wages,
- Basic reporting,
- task management (similar to Jira, no general resource management is included),
- Visual planning,
- Basic invoicing.
Everhour – Other Features
However, as good as this time tracking app looks, numerous customers claim that Evehour does not exactly fit their needs. While this tool works well in very small companies, their bigger counterparts had troubles using it for some more advanced calculations or actions, as the time spent and logged in this app doesn’t automatically translate to more advanced data.
To add to that, Everhour’s native time integration with Jira also leaves much to be desired. Users often encounter problems with connections, limited data flow and other problems that may cause the data in the system to be misleading. According to numerous sources, that causes problems in both analysis and using the software in general, not only in integration with Jira.
Want to Learn More About Time Tracking?
No problem – we have just what you need. We have prepared numerous sources – both related to Jira and the problem of time tracking in general – that can help you track time, log work and improve your time tracker and timesheet tracking as much as possible.
Read about:
- Non billable and billable hours that may affect your time tracking reports,
- Planning and managing capacity, which can affect the number of tracked hours in your company,
- Useful resource leveling strategies
or simply visit our blog and find what you need there!
