How to Display Billable Hours in Jira Service Management

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You know the drill: a ticket comes in via the Jira Service Management (JSM) portal, your team works their magic, and the issue is resolved. But for your client, the story often has a missing chapter. They know that the work is done, but they don't know how much effort it took—at least, not until you manually generate a report or send an invoice weeks later.

For service teams and agencies using ActivityTimeline to track resources, this gap between internal data and external visibility has traditionally been a friction point. Clients want real-time insights into their billable hours, while you want to avoid the administrative nightmare of constant manual updates.

The solution lies in bridging your internal planning tool with customer-facing reporting. By integrating ActivityTimeline with Worklog Report, you can automate this transparency, ensuring your clients see exactly what they're paying for, the moment the work is logged.

The High Cost of Opaque Billing

In professional services, trust is the currency you trade in. When a client asks, "How many hours have been burned on this project?" and your answer is "I'll get back to you after I check the logs," that trust erodes slightly.

The problem isn't that you aren't tracking time—you likely have detailed records inside Jira. The problem is accessibility.

• Operational Inefficiency: Your team wastes valuable hours scraping data from internal timesheets to format it for client updates.
• Client Anxiety: Without visibility, clients often feel in the dark about budget burn, leading to disputes when the final invoice arrives.
• Delayed Feedback: If a project is going over budget, manual reporting often reveals this too late for the client to adjust the scope.

You need a system where the data flows seamlessly from your assignee's timesheet directly to the customer's view, without exposing sensitive internal non-billable work.

The Solution: ActivityTimeline + Worklog Report

The integration between ActivityTimeline and Worklog Report solves the visibility gap by connecting your resource management powerhouse with the customer's portal view.

Here is how the synergy works.

Internal Control with ActivityTimeline. 

Your team continues to use ActivityTimeline as their command center. Teams use it to:

• Plan workloads and assign tasks
• Track work by category (billable vs. non-billable)
• Organize team schedules and availability
• Log time in a structured, audit-ready way

They plan capacity, schedule tasks, and log hours using specific Worklog Categories (like "Billable" or "Non-Billable"). This ensures that your internal data is accurate and categorized correctly before it ever leaves the system.

External Transparency with Worklog Report. 

Through an API connection, the relevant billable data is pulled from ActivityTimeline and displayed in a simplified table on the JSM portal.

This creates a "single source of truth" where agents log time once, and permissions dictate what the customer sees. You maintain control over internal notes and non-billable admin time, while the client gets a self-service view of the effort driving their project forward.

Worklog Report, on the other hand, lives where customers do — on the Jira Service Management portal. It focuses on:

• Showing logged work directly inside each request
• Displaying who did the work and when
• Offering customers real-time visibility with no need for follow-ups

When these two apps connect via an API token, all billable hours recorded in Activity Timeline seamlessly appear in Worklog Report’s portal view.

Use case example: A customer opens their request in the portal and instantly sees the exact billable time logged so far — no emails, no extra permissions, no waiting.

Importantly, only billable entries appear on the portal. Teams can still log internal research, coordination, or investigation as non-billable, keeping internal processes clean and external communication transparent.

Mini-Walkthrough: Setting Up Billable Worklog Categories

To make this integration work effectively, your data foundation must be solid. You need to ensure your team is explicitly distinguishing between billable and non-billable work within ActivityTimeline.

Using the ActivityTimeline Administrator Guide, here is how to configure your system to track these hours accurately:

Step 1: Access Timesheet Configuration

First, ensure you have Administrator permissions. Navigate to the Configuration menu (the gear icon) and select Timesheets Configuration from the sidebar.

Step 2: Define Worklog Categories

ActivityTimeline allows you to create custom categories for time entries. This is crucial for separating client-facing work from internal tasks.

• Scroll to the Worklog Categories section.
• By default, you may see categories like "Category #0".
• Create a new category named "Billable" and another for "Non-Billable" (or "Internal").
• Ensure these are set to "Active" so they appear in the logging dialog for your users.

Step 3: Educate Your Team on Logging

Once configured, the "Log Work" dialog in Jira and ActivityTimeline will feature a dropdown menu for these categories. Instruct your team to:

1. Open the Log Work dialog on a Jira issue.
2. Enter the time spent.
3. Select "Billable" from the Category dropdown.
4. Add a clear comment describing the value delivered (since this may be visible to the client).

By standardizing this input step, you ensure that the data fed to the JSM portal via Worklog Report is always accurate and ready for client consumption.

Conclusion

Transparency is your competitive advantage. By integrating ActivityTimeline and Worklog Report into your workflows, you eliminate the administrative burden of manual status reporting and give your clients the clarity they crave. You turn a static list of tickets into a dynamic, trustworthy ledger of value delivered.

Your team stays focused on execution, your data remains organized with precise worklog categories, and your clients stay happy knowing exactly where their budget is going.

Explore ActivityTimeline and Worklog Report features today or log in to configure your worklog categories now.