Building a report
A report is a date range, up to three fields to group by, optional filters, and a way to display it. The date range and metric already have defaults, so in practice the only decision is what to group by.
Start from a template
The Reports tab is your saved reports — the one you ran yesterday is usually what you came back for. Templates live one step inside New report, where Start from is the first question:
- Team utilization
- Hours per person against their weekly target.
- Hours logged over time
- How the total moves week by week.
- Share of hours
- How the total splits across whatever you group by.
- Time by epic
- Hours rolled up to the epic above each issue.
A template fills the rest of the dialog in for you, and every part of it can then be changed. They’re starting points, not locked presets — and you can start from a blank one instead.
Grouping by any field
The group-by picker lists common fields first, then a section headed Your custom fields. Anything Jira stores on an issue can be a grouping — client, cost centre, a billable checkbox, a team name, a component. No configuration, no request to us, no higher plan.
Add up to three. The order matters: the first is the outer grouping, the rest nest inside it. Drag to reorder.
They get their own group, labelled Field not set, rather than being left out. If a report’s total looks lower than you expect, that group is usually the reason — and you can click into it to see which issues are missing the field.
Filters and measure
Filters narrow which entries are counted — most commonly approval status, so a billing report only includes approved time. You can also filter by project, or match a value on any field you can group by.
Measure is what the numbers are:
- Logged hours
- The total time. This is the default.
- Entries
- How many entries there are, rather than how long they were.
- Hours vs target
- Hours against each person’s weekly target, which is what makes a utilization report.
Saving and who can see it
Create report saves it to the Reports tab. Reopening it with Edit report gives you the same dialog, and the button then says Save changes — there is no second set of controls to learn.
Every report has a Who can see it setting with two positions, and that is the whole of sharing:
- Only me
- Nobody else sees it in the list, and if they reach it another way — a bookmark, or a dashboard gadget pointing at it — they’re refused.
- Everyone
- Anyone on your site finds it under Public in the Reports tab. Only you can change it — other people get Duplicate instead of Edit report, which gives them their own copy to alter.
There is no invitation to send and no link to paste. A report is a thing in the list that is either yours alone or everyone’s, so there is no pending state to chase and nothing to revoke.
A report only ever counts time on issues its reader can already see in Jira, so two people opening the same public report may see different totals. That’s deliberate — making a report public shares the question, not the permission to see the answer.
Exporting
Export CSV gives you the underlying rows, not the summary — one line per time entry, with the grouping fields as columns. Durations use your display format, so switch to decimal first if the file is going into a spreadsheet or payroll.