Automatic time tracking in Jira

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Yes, there's no secret that timesheets are a pain .. you know where! Some people might enjoy it because it gives them the ultimate validation of achievement, however, for most, it's more akin to cleaning their garage out - procrastinating to the point they have no choice.

Getting your devs and support techs to keep an accurate timesheet can be a far-fetched dream for most businesses like yours. The 'reminders' in the team meetings might push devs and support techs to maintain their work logs for a week or two, but in the end - back to where we started. Before we cover the importance of automated work logs for Jira, let's first cover why is time tracking and timesheets important in the first place:

• Billing purposes

The primary reason for timesheets is to bill your customers for the work you've done for them, be it a team full of dev contractors working on an external project or your support team handling issues. At the end of the project, you can handover your work log report to your clients showing them what you worked on and how you worked on it. 

• Planning and forecasting

Timesheets can be a great way to plan a project - it gives you a fantastic overview of how your resources were used or can be used in the future for a similar project. This refrains you from underestimating or overestimating the time spent on a project. 

• R&D Tax refunds or grants

Reports from time tracking tools like  Tempo Timesheets help you get tax credits or grants, depending on the country you operate from, at the end of financial year - saving your business a substantial amount of money

Now that we've established the importance of time-tracking, let's move on to the fun bit - how to automate the work logs? The answer is simple - EasyTime. A tool that automatically logs work. Imagine that all your team needs to do is click on the issue they're working on, and the timesheets fill up as they go through their issues. Yes - it's that easy! 

Automated work logging will enable your team to:

• Track time in real-time

Instead of recording the time after the fact, desperately trying to remember where you spent the time, getting creative or making assumptions based on your calendar or workflow transitions - why not have automated work logs for Jira.

• Quick timesheet review

You and your team will be able to quickly review timesheets if use Tempo Timesheets, see the highlighted automated work logs where you can go and add your comments and have a timesheet worth submitting in no time. 

• Present accurate billing

EasyTime works in the background without being touched. Even when you switch between issues, it keeps a tab on the comments you make, issue progress and view. All of which can be configured according to your business needs. This ensures that you are never over-charging and in most cases under-charging your customers. You are confident of the work log report you present to your clients without losing revenue for your business. The math is simple:

Accurate work logs = Accurate timesheets = Accurate billing

• Log time in pre-defined chunks

You can customise the minimal work log increments, you want your team to log every 5,10,15 or even 30 minutes? Done. 

• Switch tasks without worry

The work is logged automatically when the user views the issue, adds a comment or resolves the issue. Along with this, we introduced automatic features to resolve conflicts, perform merging and recognise the relative priority of events. EasyTime catches distractions early on when you don't have time to look at your timesheets. 

EasyTime takes away the pain from all the manual work logging and gives your team a ready to edit timesheet. It works like a spell-checker, earlier on you'd have to read each word carefully and to see grammatical errors, now it comes highlighted making your work easier. Similarly, EasyTime makes work logging an easy experience. And like we always say,

Be Lazy. The machine does it better - #everykeystrokematters

You can try the app here and see how it works for your team.