How to Build a Transparent Time-Tracking System for Your Portal Customers?

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Tracking time is part of every project manager’s life. But let’s be honest, Jira’s built-in time tracking is like that reliable old watch… It tells you the time, but it doesn’t show you much else.

In today’s service-driven world, transparency matters, not only within your team but also with your customers. Your team needs to know who’s doing what and when. Your customers want to see how their requests are progressing and exactly how much effort you’re putting in.

A truly transparent time-tracking system goes beyond logging hours, it makes that information clear, accessible, and meaningful for everyone, including your Jira Service Management portal customers.

Where Jira time-tracking falls short

While Jira’s built-in time tracking lets team members easily log hours on individual tasks, it doesn’t provide the broader insight needed for effective workload planning and resource management. Managers need a clear, visual overview to understand how time is spread across projects, spot potential conflicts, and adjust priorities before issues arise.

Jira’s standard reports mostly show past data, which means teams often miss opportunities to balance work proactively. Additionally, since Jira’s time tracking is primarily an internal tool, customers and stakeholders don’t get visibility into the actual effort behind their requests. This gap can slow down decision-making and lead to misunderstandings or frustration for everyone involved.

Benefits of Activity Timeline compared to Jira time tracking

Activity Timeline expands Jira’s time tracking by helping teams plan ahead, not just log time. It introduces visual timelines for individuals, teams, and projects, so managers can immediately see who’s working on what, how much time they have available, and who might be overloaded.

Its drag-and-drop interface simplifies adjusting tasks to fit changing demands. With the built-in capacity management, teams can balance assignments to avoid both burnout and underuse.

The app also supports custom time categories, like billable and non-billable hours, making it easier to track time for reporting or invoicing needs.

Beyond individual tasks, Activity Timeline provides insight into project and task progress across multiple projects, giving a big-picture view that goes beyond simple logged hours.

Team calendars and shared visibility improve collaboration and communication, both aspects where Jira’s native time tracking falls short.

With custom filters and reports, you can compare what you planned with what actually happened, keep an eye on team availability, and use those insights to plan better in the future. With all of this, managing your team’s time and workload a lot simpler and clearer.

Why Showing Time Tracking Reports on the JSM Portal Matters

While Activity Timeline helps teams plan, schedule, and manage workloads with a clear visual timeline, the actual logged hours and detailed work records are often hidden from the end users, your Jira Service Management portal customers. This is where Worklog Report steps in to bridge the gap between internal tracking and external transparency.

Teams can log time directly in Activity Timeline and use Worklog Report to display that logged time on the Jira Service Management portal, making it visible to your customers.

Worklog Report reads the actual worklogs stored in Jira, including the time logged from Activity Timeline, and displays this detailed logged work on the Jira Service Management portal. This integration allows teams to benefit from Activity Timeline’s powerful internal workload management while making the logged time visible to customers on the portal.

Because Jira itself doesn’t natively show detailed worklogs on the customer portal, Worklog Report fills that gap by giving portal customers self-serve access not only to issue status but also to the actual time spent working on their requests. This means customers can see exactly how much effort has been invested in their cases, who worked on them and when, providing genuine transparency.

For example, if a customer wants to check how much time was logged on their requests over the past month, they can do it themselves with Worklog Report. Portal Customers don’t need to contact agents for manual updates, like they usually would without a self-service option.

How Activity Timeline and Worklog Report Work Together

These two apps complement each other well:

• Activity Timeline helps your team plan, schedule, and balance workloads internally.

• Worklog Report makes the logged work visible on the JSM portal for your customers.

This combination provides a full picture: from internal workload management to external transparency. Customers get clear visibility into the effort behind their requests, while teams benefit from better planning and balanced workloads.

Reliex and Nemetschek Bulgaria are working together to provide even deeper integration between the apps and enable teams to expose only billable hours to their customers,  making time tracking clearer and more useful for both teams and customers.

If you're curious about how to implement these use cases, reach out to discuss them.