JIRA - generating work log reports

Question

We are using JIRA to manage our tasks and to allow our client to review the progress and decides what to do next. Our developers are logging their work pretty accurately.

Ideally our workflow would be the following:

1. Client asks for a new feature.
2. We create a JIRA task, assign it to a free developer and do our time estimation and also evaluate how much per hour the client will pay (depends on complexity of the task and experience of the developers).
3. After some period (a month, or maybe when the new stable version is released) the client gets our report of how many hours each developer has worked and how much the client has to pay.

Problems:

• there is no "payment for hour" field for the task (this field should be visible only to project admins and the client).
• there is no plugin or feature, which could use the logged hours
  multiplied by hour rate for each task and generate a report since the date when the client did the last payment.

Because of this, we did some parallel bookkeeping in Excel, but it just seems wrong and takes too much time.

Is there any JIRA plug-in (or any application which uses JIRA database directly) that could help us with such reports?

Answer 1

There really isn't a plugin that I know of that does quite what you need. Luckily, JIRA is very extensible. Here's a suggestion.

What I would recommend is to add a custom field in JIRA for Payment for Hour. You do this (in JIRA 5) as follows:

• Click on the Administration link in the top right corner of the page
• Issues at the top then Fields
• Add Custom Field at the top
• Add a number type field
• Put it on the screen/project you want, probably a special screen that can only be gotten to by admins

After you have the new field, populate it as desired. Then, when it comes time to run the report, do a JIRA search and whittle down the columns to the description, developer, time spent, and hourly rate. From there, export the output into Excel. It should then be quite trivial for you to add a new column with a formula to multiply the hours against the rate and even sum at the bottom. If adding the field is too much work, you may want to just to just add the rate in Excel directly.

If the field isn't as "admin only" as you'd like, creating an admin only field is pretty much the first and most basic JIRA development tutorial out there:

https://developer.atlassian.com/display/JIRADEV/How+to+create+a+new+Custom+Field+Type

There may be a plugin out there for admin only fields now, but it isn't too hard to do yourself if you have a bit of technical know how and can follow instructions.

Answer 2

Let me suggest implementing this with the JIRA PDF View Plugin.

(Disclaimer: this is a commercial product, and I'm a developer working on this. Nevertheless it perfectly fits your needs, so recommending this should not validate any rules - hopefully.)

This plugin is fully programmable. In fact, there is already a "timesheet and invoice" template (sample) among the default templates shipped with the plugin. All what it does is simply aggregating the worklog entries (who worked how many hours, and with what purpose), computing the total efforts and multiplying that with an hourly rate. This can be exactly what you need, or can be used as a starting point for further customizations.

Notes:

1. To implement the "since the last payment" feature, you should just add a new date picker type custom field to the issue. Then, while processing the worklog, trivially skip the entries before that date (those are already paid). Remember to manually update that field at each payment.

2. JIRA does not have a feature "field level visibility", thus it does not offer a solution for the hiding the "hourly rate" field. Nevertheless the Field Security Plugin for JIRA may fill the gap. (Search for it on the Atlassian Marketplace.) I am not affiliated with this plugin, nor particularly familiar with this, but based on the reviews, people seem to like it.

Answer 3

I know this post is very old. But this could help someone else looking for the solution.

One of the free option available is to use the browser extension named Jira Assistant developed by me available in below url. This extension has lot more useful features which not only helps to generate report, but also help to log your work on daily basis with notifications, calendar integrations and lot more cool features which helps both managers and team members in their daily activity:

For Chrome users: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jira-assistant/momjbjbjpbcbnepbgkkiaofkgimihbii?src=sof

For Firefox users: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jira-assistant/

Read more about it: https://github.com/shridhar-tl/jira-assistant