New Tempo Timesheets + Structure integration: Detailed time-tracking data in your issue hierarchy
“How much time and effort are we expending on this project?” is a fundamental question in project portfolio management, and the “Time Spent” field in Jira is critical for delivering this information. But it doesn’t yield the detailed, comprehensive insights you need for effective reporting and decision making, such as:
- Which Jira users contributed time to a project?
- What percentage of hours was billable vs non-billable?
- For project-level reporting, how much time was spent on all the various issues within a parent epic or initiative?
- When you’re looking across projects and teams, what is the aggregate Time Spent?
Now, a new integration available for Jira Cloud between project portfolio management app Structure for Jira and Tempo Timesheets, the #1 Jira time-tracking app, can provide these types of actionable insights about your resources’ use of time.
This integration marks the first big leap forward since ALM Works — the company behind Structure — joined forces with Tempo Software.
Timesheets is a Jira app that allows project managers to categorize time spent (such as billable vs non-billable hours) and support functions such as invoicing and reporting on capital expenditures vs operating expenses (CAPEX/OPEX).
Structure provides a spreadsheet-like view of Jira issues that allows users to organize and view their work in whatever hierarchy they prefer.
With this new integration, the view of Jira issues can include vital information from Tempo Timesheets for a complete visualization of the time and resources expended on a project.
Here’s how to use this new feature to unlock a whole new world of strategic project management and decision making.
View and roll up billable time for any project, across any hierarchy
You can now find a Tempo Work Logged column option in Structure that you can add to your project or portfolio overview, as easily as you can add any other Jira field as a column.
(If you’re already a Tempo Timesheets and Structure user, it’s a one-time setup to get started.)
As the name suggests, the integration lets you see the logged time data from Tempo Timesheets in Structure. But if you’re a project manager who wants to keep tabs on a project’s real progress — which is sometimes not the actual time spent but the actual billable time (e.g., what you can invoice the customer), two game-changing features of the integration are the ability to show billable time only and sum up values to their parent issue.
As with all numeric values in Structure, you can easily roll up billable hours to the epic or initiative, allowing you to see project- and portfolio-level insights directly in Structure alongside the issue-level Jira information you’ll need anyway. No need to switch between two apps.
The screenshot above shows a top-down hierarchy of initiatives broken down by epics and tasks, but you can easily change this — for example, to group by sprints instead — and the Tempo Work Logged columns will update dynamically.
View logged and billable time for single or multiple users
Need to know how much time a user logged and/or billed to a Jira issue? The Tempo Work Logged column lets you filter by Jira user, so you can see how many hours were logged versus billed, per user, within the context of your entire project or portfolio.
With the project-level total logged and billable time (see Total Logged Work and Total Billable Work columns) alongside the user-level total logged and billed time (see User - Billable and User - Total), you can easily see a particular resource’s optimization and track how much and where their billable and non-billable hours are being spent.
If you’re working with estimates, you can add the Original Estimate column to see if the time spent is getting too close to the budgeted or planned work, so that you can adjust the Jira issues in real time (directly in the structure) and communicate changes to stakeholders before problems arise.
And if you need to get insights for multiple users at once — for example, if you want to look at a specific team — you can choose those users from the drop-down and the values will aggregate in real time.
Get project- and user-level time insights for any time period
Whether you’re viewing project-level or user-level time-logged data, you can change the period to align with the reporting time frame you need.
“Time” to get the most accurate view of your Jira portfolio
Combine real-time project information in Structure with the latest time-logged data from Tempo Timesheets.
➡️ Using Structure and Tempo Timesheets already? Discover what’s possible when you use both apps together.
➡️ Hearing about these apps for the first time? Learn more about Structure and Tempo Timesheets and try them both free for 30 days.
➡️ We want your feedback! Let us know what you think of this integration, and how you’d like our apps to work together.
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Kathryn Vargas _Tempo_
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Product Manager (Tempo), Atlassian Community Leader (Berlin)
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