New: Labor Rates arrive in Focus and Talent

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Connecting labor costs to strategic priorities

Most leaders can answer the question: “What are our strategic priorities?” Far fewer can answer: “What do they actually cost us?” For years, operations teams have calculated cost in spreadsheets, manually stitching together headcount data from HR with finance data and Jira data.

This process is brittle, time-consuming, and typically breaks right when you need to make a hard decision. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that the first milestone of Funds in Strategy Collection is generally available: Labor Rates in Focus and Talent.

By setting up rate cards in Atlassian Talent, you can track annualized labor costs for your focus areas and organization, and unlock a view of your financial reality.

Labor Rates are the first essential milestone on our journey to provide a comprehensive financial management solution for focus areas, all within Strategy Collection.

The Positions tab in Focus now shows estimated annual labor cost of allocated positions as well as breakdowns by sub-focus area, job family, location and tenure.

Highlights

Labor cost rollups by focus area: Focus and Talent show annualized estimates of labor costs rolled up by focus area. If you re-allocate a team from one focus area to another, the cost implications are instant.

Granular breakdowns by job family, location and tenure: You can break down labor costs by job family, location and tenure. This helps you spot if you are allocating your most expensive resources to low-priority maintenance work, or if a critical initiative is underfunded.

Permission controls: We know that your rate cards and data are sensitive. We built this feature with strict Group-Level Permissions. You control exactly who sees the labor rates and labor costs in Focus and Talent. And of course, the default is no access: no Focus or Talent users can see this data, unless you give them permissions.

How Labor Rates work

The setup is designed to be low-friction for Talent and Focus admins:

1. Import rate cards in Talent: Start by uploading labor rate cards via CSV. We support flexible granularity, so you could map rates by role, level, location, and more.
2. Give users permissions: Add users to the groups that can view labor costs.
3. Visualize data in Focus and Talent: The Positions tab in Focus and Talent now becomes your financial lens. It gives you a view of the annualized labor cost of each focus area, based on the positions allocated to it.

Where can I learn more?

• Documentation: Set up Talent labor rates for Focus
• Documentation: Manage user group permissions

Ready to get started?

Head to your Talent settings to configure your first rate card. As always, let us know your feedback in the comments below.

Not using either Focus or Talent yet? Contact your account team or submit a support ticket to get started.

[__ Jimi Wikman]

Another import?

Why can't you add this manually if you want to?

How do you define Labor rates, and how is this connected to individuals? Can I assign a base salary only, or is it something that can be used for Vendors and project costs as well?