Manual time tracking in Jira Core

Question

Hello Community

Is there anybody who can help a newcomer to Jira Cloud how to make a simple and manual Time/resource tracking.

What I want to accomplish:

A very simple solution to use for time tracking in a way where the assignee herself put an time estimate on the task and when the task is done adds the actual time spent. So only two fields are required: Estimated time and actual time. (it has to be easy to use - my users are all new to JIRA).

The project manager should then be able to see the resource spent -and download to excel- in a report.

How can this be done? I´ve travelled through a massive amount of youtubes and documentation without finding what i need.

Nikki Zavadska _Appfire_ · Answer

Hi Nicolaj,

Jira seems to be quite limited when it comes to time tracking reporting.

What you can do is to use Jira default fields in the issues:

Original estimate for initial estimation

Time spent in Time tracking section

(read more about this here)

This works well for logging time and should be easy enough to use even if you're new to Jira.

The problem comes with reporting. There are some default Jira reports which you can use but none of them seems to do exactly what you're looking for.

What I would probably do is to keep each issue assigned to the person who was working on it and then run JQL search to get issues in the sprint or version (depending on how your team works) and showed assigned, original estimate and time spent columns.

1. then you can export your search result into excel and do all processing there

OR

2. there is new-ish Jira functionality which shows results from JQL in google sheets. Using this free addon you should be able to see results of JQL almost realtime and you can create your own charts and reports.

Let me know if this works for you. If no, I think there are plenty of addons you can use on the marketplace for time tracking.