What is Cost Tracking in Jira? Tips&Tricks for Software Development Industry

[#1]

Cost tracking in project management refers to monitoring and recording the expenses associated with a project. It involves systematically collecting and analyzing data on project costs to ensure that the project stays within budget and to provide accurate financial information for decision-making.

 How are you doing it in Jira? What apps are must-haves? Go with SaaSJet on this journey!

Why is cost tracking important?

There are many factors, and they all seem obvious. But most PMs don't pay attention to them or ignore them as something insignificant. Let's briefly list the main ones: 

• Budget management: It helps identify areas of overspending or cost overruns early on so that corrective actions can be taken to avoid financial constraints.
• Resource allocation: Cost tracking provides insights into how project resources, such as labor, equipment, software, and infrastructure, are being utilized and where the costs are being incurred. 
• Financial forecasting: Project managers can develop accurate financial forecasts by tracking costs throughout the project lifecycle. This helps estimate future costs, predict cash flow requirements, and plan for contingencies or potential risks that may impact the project's financial health.
• Performance evaluation: Tracking costs helps measure the project's performance against planned budgets and financial targets. It enables project managers to compare actual costs with estimated costs, identify any deviations, and analyze the reasons behind them.
• Stakeholder communication: Cost tracking provides transparency and accountability to project stakeholders, including clients, sponsors, and executives. It allows project managers to communicate the project's financial status, highlight cost-saving initiatives, and demonstrate responsible financial management. This builds trust, enhances stakeholder confidence, and fosters better collaboration and support.

Who uses cost tracking?

Cost tracking provides significant advantages to all stakeholders involved in a particular project. Project managers utilize cost tracking to assess program progress and expectations. Clients depend on cost tracking to gauge whether their requested product or deliverable is within their anticipated financial range. Additionally, project team members benefit from cost tracking by understanding whether they should seek more cost-efficient solutions to fulfil their tasks.

Implementing Project Tracking Systems

We will not be able to implement tracking mechanisms without powerful tools. So, here's what we advise you not to do without: 

🔥Jira Product Discovery. We're not going to talk about the commonplace and familiar apps. But this one has won the hearts of our team. Structuring of information, the whole team, from the developer to the marketer, understands what is currently in the process, what features are on the way, etc. A great assistant!

⌚Time-tracking tools. We use Clockwork Automated Time Tracking & Timesheets. It's an easy-to-use addon. We use it to keep track of all team members workflows.

💰Cost-tracking apps. Cost Tracker for Jira Cloud is an app that lets you keep your finger on the financial pulse of a project. It allows you to enter all expenses as a single database and link them to people, tasks, or specific projects. Assign hourly ratings to team members, and generate cost and time reports. Another significant plus is the addition of planned time and budget features, which allows you to ensure no cost overruns on a project, sprint, version, etc.

Cost Tracker allows you to manage costs in any Jira project:

• Jira Software
• Jira Work Management
• Jira Service Management
• Jira Product Discovery

Tips&Tricks for effective cost tracking with Cost Tracker 

The app was developed based on our company's "pains" and on monitoring trending requests. Since the release date, it has been actively refined and implemented in the team's workflow.

Mostly, it is a management tool of different levels. So, here are examples of use and our advice: 

1. Manage access to the information available in the add-on in a quality manner. So, first of all, set up access for your team members.

2. Assign hourly rates to the team. It is possible to set ratings with an effective date, and then the calculation of costs will be based on the correct ratings, even if it changes during the person's work.

3. Use the app as a single repository to track expenses. This way, you won't miss anything, you'll have a history of all expenses, and you'll be able to associate them directly with a specific project in cost reports, which will help you track its costs.

4. Analyze everything, subject it to thorough research, formulate hypotheses and support them with data. Cost reports are pretty informative and easy to generate. A significant plus is the ability to set a planned budget when estimating the cost of a project. This helps to identify in real-time how much of the budget has already been spent and how much we still have in the resource. It is very helpful in avoiding cost overruns.

Takeaway

So, I think more than enough arguments favour implementing cost tracking in the workflow. And it doesn't matter if you are a small startup or a more serious and established team. Money requires an account. Project development requires money. You synchronize and account for it or let it go to waste and make no profit.

Here are 30 days trial to get to know the Cost Tracker app. We will be glad to see you at SaaSJet.

P.S. We invite you to read other articles and use cases from our team: 

• Tracking Project Costs in Jira with Cost Tracker
• The Cost of an Issue in Jira with Cost Tracker
• How to get your team meeting cost in Jira
• How to calculate version cost in Jira
• How to calculate the cost for efforts on JSM issues
• How much does one bug cost
• Cost tracking for marketing teams in Jira
• How to Move Tempo Worklogs to Cost Report?