Using Jira as a status report - with version history

[Scott Hannaford]

hi all - we've been using Jira for a while, but without any formal training etc so lacking a lot of knowledge about functionality and use.

At the moment our project managers fill in weekly status reports, in Excel. It's a very simple form which the PMs update once a week and then save, to include the date in the file name, so that they have new reports saved each week - i.e. weekly versions.

I was wondering if there was a project template that would allow us to:

- create a series of description fields to record dates, free text and drop-downs

- but once saved creates a new version 

- with all old versions being accessible

I appreciate this is not what Jira is really about, but we use Jira in a few different ways and I'd love to get the reports into Jira - and it's only possible if we can see previous versions.

thanks in advance

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Scott Hannaford 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

No, Jira is not designed to track reports and versions of reports.

You could consider creating an issue to hold your report information, and then create a new issue with new data each time you need a new "version" of that report. If you wanted to keep all the "versions" for a given "report" collected in a group, then you could use Sub-tasks under an issue, with each sub-task being another version of the report.

But this is really not what Jira is designed for. Have you considered the Confluence product instead? That product is really much better suited to your purpose.

https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence

Each report can be a page. You can either clone the pages to make new version, or simply update the page realizing that Confluence keeps track of the changes made to a page to a previous version could still be accessed.

[Trudy Claspill]

Also, FYI, there is some free training available for the Jira product at the Atlassian University website:

https://university.atlassian.com