Time tracking in Jira Cloud: what’s built in, what an app adds, and how Calibro Track does it

Jira can record time against an issue out of the box. What it cannot do is show a person’s week, ask anyone to approve it, or tell you how many hours went to a client. This page is the honest version of that gap, and how Calibro Track fills it.

Written 2026-09-09 from the app’s own documentation and changelog. Everything here is shipped, not planned.

What Jira tracks on its own

Every Jira Cloud issue has a work log: Log work on the issue adds a duration, a date and a comment, and the issue’s Time tracking field sums those against an original and remaining estimate. It is per issue and it is good at what it does — a developer estimating a story and burning it down has everything they need.

What the work log is not is a timesheet. Three things a team runs into the first week it tries to use it as one:

• There is no week. A person’s time is scattered across every issue they touched. Answering “what did I log on Tuesday?” means a JQL search over worklogs, and “is my week complete?” has no screen at all.
• Nobody approves anything. A work log is written the moment it is saved. There is no submitted state, no queue for a lead to review, no reason attached to a rejection, and nothing that locks after a decision. For payroll or client billing that is the whole problem.
• Reporting stops at the issue. Jira’s built-in time tracking report is per project and per issue. Hours by client, by cost centre, by a billable checkbox, by anything your admins added as a custom field — the work log carries none of it, because the field belongs to the issue, not to the hours.

What a time-tracking app adds

Every Marketplace time-tracking app is answering those three gaps, and they differ mostly in how far past them they go. The things worth having a firm answer on before choosing one:

A timesheet

A week of one person’s time across issues, with a total against a target and a way to say it is finished.

An approval step

Submitted time waiting on someone, decided with a reason, and locked once it is decided.

Reporting by any field

Hours grouped by whatever the issue carries — standard fields and the custom ones your instance actually runs on — without a configuration project first.

A way out

Approved hours as a file payroll or billing can import, and a full export you can take with you if you leave.

Where the data lives

Inside your Atlassian site, or on the vendor’s servers. It decides whether the app is one more line in a security review or a new processor to assess.

How Calibro Track does it

Calibro Track is a Jira Cloud app that adds exactly those five things and stops there. It installs from the Atlassian Marketplace, runs entirely on Atlassian Forge, and appears as a global page under Apps, a Time tracking panel on every issue, and a dashboard gadget. There is no setup wizard; the defaults come from your Jira language settings.

Four ways to log time

All four write the same entry, and every surface you have open redraws the moment one is written.

1. Type it. Pick the issue — the picker already lists what is assigned to you and what you logged on recently — and type a duration the way you would say it: 2h30, 1.5h, 90. Works from the timesheet or from the issue panel.
2. Time it. One timer at a time, running on the server rather than in your tab, so closing the laptop doesn’t stop it. Stopping writes the entry. A timer left running turns amber at four hours and stops itself at eight, into a flagged draft that says so. Both limits are your admin’s to set.
3. Draw it on the calendar. Switch the timesheet to Calendar view and drag a block onto the hour it happened, or drag an issue in from the rail. Same entries as the list, with a start time attached.
4. Say it. Press Ask Track and tell the app’s own Rovo agent what you did: log 2 to 3pm on the design review. It confirms the issue and the minutes before writing, never invents a duration, and watches nothing. How the agent works →

Submit, approve, lock

Time starts as a draft. Submitting a week hands it to whoever approves that project; any one of them can approve the week in one action or decide entry by entry, and a rejection goes back with the reason attached to the row. Approved entries lock. There is one step and no chains, which is a deliberate choice for teams whose approver is a lead, not a committee. How approvals work →

Report by any field, custom ones included

A report is a date range, up to three fields to group by, and optional filters. The group-by picker lists the common fields first and then a section headed Your custom fields — client, cost centre, a billable checkbox, a component, a team name — with no configuration and no higher plan. Rows drill down to the entries behind them, and any report exports to CSV one entry per line.

Approved hours, in the file payroll already reads

An admin defines the payroll file once — presets for ADP Workforce Now, Gusto, Paychex Flex, Workday, QuickBooks Payroll and Rippling, plus a generic CSV, every column remappable — and whoever runs payroll exports approved hours for any range from the Approvals tab. Before the download, the run screen shows the totals, what changed since the last export of that range, and everyone who is not in the file, by name, with the reason. Payroll export in the docs →

Where the data lives

Your time entries are stored in Forge SQL, Atlassian’s own database service, attached to your site. The app declares no network egress at all — there is no Calibro server for the data to travel to, which is what the Runs on Atlassian badge on the listing attests. Uninstalling removes the app and its storage; export first. Jira’s own work log is never modified.

What it deliberately doesn’t do

Choosing a time-tracking app is mostly deciding what you don’t need. Calibro Track is a timesheet, an approval step and a report; it is not a way to run a services business. Specifically:

• It does not write Jira’s work log. Track keeps its own entries. If another tool reads Jira’s Time Spent field, hours logged in Track will not be in it.
• No capacity planning, billing rates, invoicing or CapEx/OpEx. Hours, not money.
• No activity watching. Nothing reads your calendar, commits or editor to suggest entries. You say what you did, and it is written down.
• No public REST API and no mobile app. It runs in Jira in a browser; agents reach it through Rovo.
• No import of historical time yet. A team leaving another tool starts with an empty timesheet.

What it costs

Free for Jira sites with up to 10 users. Above that, US$1.20 per user per month for every user on the site, billed by Atlassian with your Jira bill, stepping down automatically as the site grows. No feature gates: custom-field reporting, the timer, the agent and the payroll export are on every plan. If you stop paying, your data stays readable and exportable. The pricing page has the bands.