How to Track Time in Jira: A Practical Guide for 2025
Over the years working with different Jira setups, I’ve noticed one thing: every team thinks they’re tracking time — but few are doing it in a way that actually helps management decisions.
Some teams log hours only when billing clients; others skip it altogether. Either way, accurate time data is often the missing link between busy work and profitable work.
This post isn’t about promoting a specific tool — it’s about showing how you can extend Jira’s time tracking capabilities using available integrations. In this example, I’ll reference TMetric, which integrates with Jira and helps teams connect worklogs to billing and reporting.
(Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with TMetric, . I’m sharing it here as an example of a publicly available Jira integration that teams often use for time tracking.)
1. Why Bother Tracking Time in Jira?
Time tracking is less about control and more about visibility.
When you know how much time a sprint or task actually takes, you can plan better, estimate more accurately, and see which projects are profitable.
Jira already includes a “Log Work” option, but that only scratches the surface.
If you want clear project-level insights — such as billable vs non-billable hours, payroll summaries, or profitability — you’ll need to connect Jira with a dedicated tracker.
2. Jira’s Built-In Time Tracking (and Its Limits)
Jira lets you log work manually on each issue, and that’s great for internal tracking.
But as projects scale, most teams run into the same limits:
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No real-time timer
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No single timesheet view
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Difficult to link time data to billing or costs
That’s where an external time-tracking tool can complement Jira, without changing how your team already works.
3. Tracking Time in Jira Using TMetric
For teams that want to track time directly from Jira issues, TMetric integrates smoothly through a browser extension or Marketplace app.
Once it’s connected, you’ll see a Start Timer button inside Jira. When you stop the timer, the worklog automatically syncs back.
This integration removes manual entry errors and gives managers consistent, real-time visibility across all projects.
4. Timesheets for Project Management
Once your team starts using timers, timesheets practically build themselves.
You can review daily or weekly summaries grouped by user or project, making it easy to approve logged time or detect missing entries before invoicing.
It’s simple, but it saves hours every week — especially for teams juggling multiple client projects.
5. From Time to Money: Billing and Invoicing
For service-based teams, time literally turns into money.
TMetric allows you to tag time entries as billable, apply rates, and export that data into invoices.
Instead of exporting CSVs from Jira and doing math in Excel, managers can generate clean reports that link each invoice line directly to work done in Jira.
6. Project Profitability and Payroll
A new feature rolling out in TMetric is the Profitability Report — it compares tracked time, costs, and revenue per project.
It’s the kind of data that helps you decide which clients or tasks are worth scaling.
On the HR side, the Payroll Report uses the same synced Jira data to calculate accurate payouts for every team member — no double entry required.
TMetric Project Summary — time, cost, and billable hours in one view.
7. Wrapping Up
Time tracking in Jira doesn’t need to be complex.
For many of my clients, simply adding an external tracker like TMetric gave them the visibility Jira lacked — timesheets, billing, and profitability, all while keeping Jira as the central workspace.
If you’ve ever felt Jira’s work logs were “not enough,” this approach might be the right balance between automation and simplicity.
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