Cost Tracking for SaaS Product Teams in Jira

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Every SaaS company, regardless of how groundbreaking its product is or how skilled its engineers are, ultimately worries about two things: time and сost.

Running a SaaS product team isn’t about idealized planning sessions — it’s about balancing sprint velocity, feature delivery, and strict budget limits.

Developers handle an endless flow of Jira issues, designers refine prototype after prototype, QA hunts down bugs, and finance… well, finance keeps asking the same question over and over again:

• How much did this release really cost us?
• Which department spent the most resources?
• Can we forecast the budget for the next quarter?
  

And here’s the problem: without the right tools, we can track hours, but we can’t easily turn those hours into real costs. We know what we pay for cloud infrastructure or third-party services, but do we truly understand how much it costs in terms of people’s time to build a single feature?

Our team faced the same challenge — and that’s why we turned to the Time & Cost Tracker for Jira Cloud. With it, the hours logged by engineers, designers, and QA stopped being just numbers on a board and transformed into financial data we could analyze, compare, and use for smarter planning.

Estimating the cost of product development in Jira

Product development is a multi-layered process: planning, sprints, testing, releases, and hotfixes. And each department plays its role. But without systematization, all of this turns into chaos: dozens of Jira boards, spreadsheets for budgets, finance tools, and status reports.

That’s where Time & Cost Tracker comes in. Instead of scattered spreadsheets, you can see the entire cost picture directly in Jira.

For example, in our product team, we define budgets per release. Each department (Engineering, Design, QA) gets its share of the budget. Later, when people log time, we can see exactly how much money was spent against the plan.

Logging work and seeing costs in real time

Every developer, designer, or tester logs hours in Jira. With hourly rates set in the app, those hours are automatically translated into monetary values.

Instead of just seeing “logged hours,” managers now see the financial impact:

• QA: 2h × $25/h = $50.00
• Design: 190h 30m × $15/h = $4,752.50
• Engineering: 38h 52m × $25/h = $971.67

Suddenly, it’s not just time — it’s real cost per department, per sprint, per feature.

Monitoring actual vs. planned budgets

The real magic happens when we compare the planned budget vs. actual spending.

With forecasts, teams can set clear expectations for each sprint, release, or department — and later compare them with actual results.

For example:

• QA takes twice as many hours as planned, or
• Engineering exceeds the budget halfway through the sprint.

Because forecasts are tracked against reality, these issues are caught early — giving product managers the chance to adjust scope, shift resources, or re-estimate before costs get out of control.

Cost reports for finance and stakeholders

At the end of each sprint or release, we generate cost reports. These reports show:

• How much the release cost in total.
• Department-level breakdowns.

Deviations from planned budgets.

For finance teams, this is gold. Instead of vague time logs, they get exact numbers that can go directly into the company's financial planning.

And with Earned Value Management (EVM) metrics, teams can track not only how much they spent, but also how efficiently the budget was used. For example:

• Planned Value (PV): budgeted cost for the planned work.
• Earned Value (EV): budgeted cost of the work actually completed.

Actual Cost (AC): the real cost logged by the team.

This lets finance and product leaders evaluate whether the project is on track, ahead, or overspending — making the reports a powerful tool for both planning and accountability.

Tracking SaaS operational expenses

For SaaS companies, the cost of building a product doesn’t stop with salaries. Cloud infrastructure, third-party APIs, licenses, and even advertising campaigns all add up to a significant share of the budget.

The Expenses tab in Time & Cost Tracker allows teams to bring these non-labor costs into the same view as logged work. Instead of juggling Jira boards for people’s time and spreadsheets for external expenses, everything sits in one place.

Recurring expenses are especially common in SaaS — monthly cloud hosting, database services, or marketing subscriptions. By configuring these costs as recurring items, finance and product managers ensure that they are automatically reflected in every reporting cycle. This creates a reliable baseline for total cost of ownership and makes it easier to compare real product costs against revenue.

This holistic approach means a release report doesn’t just answer: How much time did engineers and designers spend? But also:

• How much did it cost to run servers during development?
• What were the expenses for APIs, tools, or advertising?

By combining labor and operational expenses, SaaS companies finally see the true cost of delivering features to customers.

Notes

We’re not here to tell you how to run your product team. But we do want to highlight the importance of analyzing not only velocity and output, but also financial input.
Understanding costs helps SaaS companies:

• Optimize budgets.
• Identify inefficiencies.
• Make better forecasts.
• Increase transparency for executives and investors.

👉 Try it yourself: Start a 30-day trial of Time & Cost Tracker for Jira Cloud.