How it works

Where the numbers come from

Burnrate reads every worklog on your site and stores its date, author, time spent and work item. It checks for new, changed and deleted worklogs every five minutes. It also keeps the work item details it needs: project, epic, parent, fix versions, labels, status and remaining estimate.

Each worklog is priced when it is read: hours × the rate that applied to its author on the worklog’s date. Rates are looked up in this order: the person’s own rate, then their role’s rate, then the default rate. Cost and billing rates are looked up separately, so a person can have their own cost rate and use the role’s billing rate.

What a budget counts

• Projects: all time logged in those projects.
• Epics: time on the epic, its work items and their sub-tasks. When a work item moves to another epic, its time moves with it.
• Fix versions: time on work items in the version, on their sub-tasks and, for an epic in the version, on its work items.
• JQL: time on the work items the query matches, on their sub-tasks and, for a matched epic, on its work items. The query is read within a minute or two of saving and again every day. It cannot use things that depend on who runs it, such as currentUser() or saved filters.

Only time inside the budget’s period counts: between its start and end dates for a one-off budget, or within the current month or quarter for a recurring one. Past months and quarters are listed under Past periods.

Status and forecast

• Pace is the average spend per day over the last 28 days (within the period).
• Projected is what the period will cost at that pace, and Runs out is the day the budget is used up at that pace.
• Estimate at completion (one-off budgets) is what has been spent plus the remaining estimates of open work items (including ones nobody has logged time on yet), priced at the budget’s average cost per hour so far, or at the default rate while less than an hour has a rate.
• On track, At risk (used at or above the warning level, or the forecast is over budget), Over budget, Not started, Ended, or Tracking for budgets without an amount or hours.

Billing

Billable time is priced with the billing rates on the rate card, or with a fixed hourly rate set on the budget. Work items with a non-billable label (set in Settings), and the work under them, are not billable. With the Tempo connection, Tempo’s billable hours are used.

Tempo Timesheets

With Tempo Timesheets, the worklogs Jira holds are written by Tempo’s app account, so they have no real author. Without the connection, Burnrate counts that time as “unattributed” at the default rate. With the connection, an admin pastes a Tempo API token and Burnrate reads worklogs, authors and billable hours from Tempo’s API instead; Jira’s copies are then ignored, and history is read again from Tempo.

Who sees what

People with the “Burnrate: view budgets and reports” permission see budgets, reports and the Cost panel, with costs. They do not see the rate card, cost per person or billing amounts. They only see budgets that include a project they can browse, and names of projects and work items they cannot browse are replaced. People with “Burnrate: manage rates and budgets” see every budget with its scope as saved. In reports and budget tables, names of projects and work items they cannot browse in Jira are still replaced.

Rate limits

Jira limits how much apps can read per hour. Burnrate reads in the background and pauses when it reaches its own hourly limit, so a large site may take a few hours to load its full history the first time.