Track a budget in Jira, in hours or money
Checked against Atlassian’s documentation on 3 November 2026.
A client buys 100 hours a month, or a fixed amount for a piece of work, and someone has to say how much is gone. Jira has the hours people log and no budget to set them against. This page shows what Jira gives you for a budget, where it stops, then what Logline does.
What Jira does by itself
- Estimates, per work item. Original estimate, Time spent and Remaining estimate sit on each work item. Add up a space’s or an epic’s original estimates and you have a budget of sorts, if every work item was estimated and nobody added work later.
- A search finds the work.
project = ACME AND worklogDate >= startOfMonth()lists the work items with time logged this month. Save it, and it moves with the calendar. - The Time tracking report compares the estimates of a version’s work items with the time spent on them (Jira’s Time tracking report has the details). It works per version, not per space, epic or client.
Where it stops:
- No budget in Jira. There is no place to say “100 hours a month for Acme”, so the number lives in a spreadsheet, a contract or someone’s head.
- The hours are all-time. The Time spent beside a work item is its whole history, so a monthly budget needs the worklogs of that month, added up again every month (Hours logged in a Jira space per month).
- No money. Jira has no hourly rates, so a budget in money is hours times rate in a spreadsheet, after splitting the export’s worklog cells into rows.
- No end in sight. Nothing says where the work lands at today’s pace.
With Logline
Logline is our app. A Jira admin adds a budget once, in Jira settings › Apps › Logline settings › Budgets, and every report whose rows are spaces, epics or clients then shows it. The steps are in Set a budget.
A budget is:
- on a space, an epic or a client, the client being a select, radio, checkbox or labels field on your work items that the admin picks first;
- in hours or in money, in the currency of the hourly rates;
- for each month or the whole work. A budget for the whole work of a space or a client counts from a day you choose; an epic’s counts all its time.
Set Rows to Space, Epic or the client field, and the report adds five columns after Amount:
- Budget, the amount you set.
- Spent: for an hours budget every hour logged, for a money budget the billable amount.
- Left, and % used.
- At completion: for an epic, the time so far plus its remaining estimate; for a monthly budget, the spend per working day so far times the working days left.
A worked example: the Acme Website space has a budget of 100 hours each month. In a report for this month by space, its row shows 100h in Budget, the hours logged in Spent, what is left, the share used, and where the month ends at the current pace. The Total line adds the budgets it shows; hours and money do not add up, so it says so and shows no sum.
Where a figure cannot be backed, Logline shows “—” and says why on hover: a monthly budget needs a period of whole months, and a money budget needs hourly rates with every billable hour priced. Download Excel and Download CSV carry the budget columns, each budget once on the first line of its row.
Who sees what: budgets are shown to people who see everyone’s worklogs, since what is spent counts everyone’s time. Logline reads, it never writes: a budget is kept in Logline’s settings, and no work item changes.
Every setting is in Settings. To see the margin on the same rows, read See cost and margin. More on the Logline home page.
