Jira integration

Jira is an excellent collaboration tool for software development teams and companies. However, you still need to set up extra solutions to properly estimate scope, plan capacity, track budgets, get portfolio-level overviews, analyze utilization, etc. Instead of implementing a gazillion additional tools to cover all that, you can simply integrate Jira with Scoro.

With the Jira integration, you can gain the necessary insights to monitor the most vital aspects of your business that contribute to its efficiency, profitability, and growth. 

While Scoro is a great tool for time tracking and task management in and of itself, it makes little sense to change existing processes if your team is already working like a well-oiled machine in Jira. With the integration in place, your team members can easily continue managing their tasks and time in Jira like they’re used to, while all the logged minutes get seamlessly synced to Scoro. You can then use this data in Scoro to gain insights into project health across the portfolio, monitor budgets, invoice clients, track utilization and productivity metrics, generate financial and operational reports, and more!

This article explains how the Jira integration works, what benefits it brings, and what the standard quote-to-cash flow would look like with the two systems integrated.

1. How the integration works

With the Jira integration, you can synchronize your project phases or tasks to Jira as epics or sprints. Worklogs from Jira will be synced back to Scoro as time entries for monitoring, invoicing, and reporting purposes.

This data synchronization provides the following benefits:

1. Ensure your projects are profitable. Scoro helps you gain visibility into your costs and profitability on a sprint or epic level. You can compare quoted values with actual time and money spent, so you can spot where you’re constantly underquoting or overservicing. By identifying trends and patterns, you can adjust your quotes and margins on the go or over time to ensure you keep your business profitable.
2. Ensure effective resource allocation. Scoro is known for its advanced project and resource planning capabilities. In sync with Jira, Scoro helps you plan your workload effectively on a sprint or epic level. You can keep the granular task management in Jira but plan out sprints and epics in Scoro to ensure you actually have enough resources to deliver the promised services on time.
3. Forecast utilization and prevent roadblocks. Scoro’s utilization report helps you forecast demand and availability, so you can better understand the business outlook. Make informed decisions about new sprints and epics or outsourcing and hiring while avoiding potential roadblocks before they become issues.
4. Streamline invoicing. Whether you’re working for fixed fees and charging your clients based on the actual time spent, you can bill your clients and manage invoices straight from Scoro. Moreover, Scoro’s native integrations with Xero and Quickbooks make it easy to connect Scoro with your preferred accounting software for even smoother payment tracking and reporting.

This is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg, as Scoro allows you to do much more with your data. Since everything is interlinked in Scoro, the time- and project-related data that’s synced over from Jira will feed directly into all of the reports, where you can slice it and dice it in various ways to analyze and improve different aspects of your business. 

What data the two systems exchange and how depends on the type of workflow you decide on. When picking a workflow, consider which data you wish to monitor in Scoro. Contact our Support team via our contact form for more information on possible solutions and respective benefits.

2. Setting up the integration

Once the integration has been activated for your site, add all your relevant team members to Scoro as active users before you start syncing data between Scoro and Jira:

1. In Scoro, go to Settings > Administration > Users and groups.
2. Add all your users one by one and ensure the following:
   • Users' email addresses in Scoro and Jira are the same
   • The Account is active toggle is enabled for every user
3. Once all users are added in Scoro, double-check if their email addresses are set as public in Jira so that Scoro could access the data about logged hours.

If you also want to track costs in real-time, consider setting up labor costs in Scoro as well.

3. High-level planning in Scoro

Once your integration and user profiles are set up, it’s time to move your high-level planning to Scoro.

Let’s take a closer look at how the standard quote-to-cash flow would look like with the two systems integrated and how you can track the key metrics.

Step 1: Define the project scope

When a new project comes in, start building it up from Scoro. Create a quote with high-level deliverables – sprints or epics. Set the units, volumes and selling prices. The quote will serve as a price proposal to your client, but it is also the basis of your budget in Scoro. Here, on the quote level, you lay the groundwork for good insights into project and service profitability. We strongly recommend you to fill out the cost section as well to estimate internal costs and set a target for margin.

Starting your workflow from the quote level helps to streamline project and task creation in Scoro as well as automate invoicing later. In addition, it allows you to maximize the power of the Quoted vs Actual table, which is an excellent tool for tracking project budget, financial progress and profitability while it’s in progress. We’ll dive into that below.

If you offer similar services with standardized prices, predefine your services for quicker quoting under Settings > Sales and finance > Products and services. This way, you can later also leverage automated reports to evaluate the profitability of each service.

Step 2: Turn the quote into a project

Once your quote is confirmed, click the Create project button to turn it into a project. This will take you directly to the project modification view, where you can name your project, establish start and due dates, add project members, and enable the budget.

You can see Jira-related fields in the bottom left corner. If you want to link the project with an already existing project in Jira, enter the Jira project key into the respective field. If the project does not yet exist in Jira, you can leave this field empty.

Note! At the moment you can set up either only Scrum or only Kanban projects from Scoro, it’s not possible to mix and match.

Save your project!

Step 3: Plan out the project

To keep all data automatically interlinked, return to the quote view once again and use the Create tasks button to create tasks – i.e. your sprints/epics – directly from the quote. 

You can then use the Gantt chart to plan out the project timeline on a high level and decide which team members to include in the sprint/epic based on their availability. The availability indicator around each team member’s avatar helps you to understand how much more work they can take on for that period. This helps to ensure you don’t overbook your resources and keep workloads reasonable. It also helps you evaluate whether your deadlines are feasible and whether you can deliver on time.

Keep in mind that if you assign people to tasks (=sprints/epics), task duration is split equally between assginees by default. If you want to divide up the scope more specifically, enable Individual time allocation under Settings > Work and projects > Calendar and tasks. This way, you can define the expected workload on an individual level. For example, if you assign both John and Kevin to a 50 h sprint/epic, you can assign 20 h to John and 30 h to Kevin, instead of having it split as 25 h and 25 h automatically.

4. Granular work management in Jira

Step 4: Send the project to Jira

Once the project is set up in Scoro, click the Scoro -> Jira button to send data over to Jira. 

• If the project doesn’t already exist in Jira (i.e. you did not link it with a project key), it will be created in Jira. Scoro tasks will be sent over as sprints/epics.
• If you linked the project with an existing Jira project, the project will simply be updated in Jira. Scoro tasks will be added as sprints/epics in Jira.

If you added start and end times to your tasks, these will be sent over to Jira as well. 

The initial sync can take up to 20-30 seconds. Once data is synced, the Jira project key field will show the project URL in Jira, so you know the sync was successful.

Whenever you add a new task to the project in Scoro, make sure to click the Scoro -> Jira button to send it over to Jira as well. The already synced tasks will not be duplicated, each task is sent over to Jira as a sprint/epic only once. Consequently, if you change the name or the start/end date of the project or any of the tasks after you’ve already synced them to Jira, these values won’t be updated in Jira. The Scoro -> Jira button sends the project/task related data over to Jira only once.

With Scrum projects, for example, you can find the synced sprints under the Backlog view in Jira.

Finish fine-tuning your sprints and issues in Jira and assign them to the team members.

Step 5: Log time in Jira

Your team can now work on the issues in Jira and log their time there. All worklogs will be automatically sent over to Scoro as time entries. With the task-to-sprint workflow, issues are not synced back to Scoro, only worklogs. Worklogs are synced to Scoro only if the sprint/epic itself was created via Scoro and the Jira integration. If you add a sprint/epic manually in Jira, it won’t be synced back to Scoro.

5. Invoicing and insights from Scoro

Step 6: Track project progress and financial health

Once sprints/epics are underway and time is being logged, you can use the Quoted vs Actual table in Scoro to track whether you’re progressing on schedule and how much money is being brought in. If you seem to be burning your budget too quickly or sprints require more hours than estimated, you can check in with the team to see what might be causing issues. Tracking quoted vs actual numbers over time will also help you scope your projects more accurately in the future to ensure you don’t cut into your own profit margins by constant overservicing.

Step 7: Invoice your clients

You can invoice your work straight from Scoro. Either turn the entire quote or parts of it into an invoice…

…or use Scoro’s time-billing function to bill the client for the actual time spent on the project. Just tick the time entries in the project view and turn them into an invoice.

You can track the status of your invoice directly from Scoro, so you’ll know when it gets paid. If you’re using accounting software, such as Xero or QuickBooks, you can integrate this with Scoro as well for a full overview.

Step 8: Track and forecast utilization

The planned work and completed time entries feed directly into Scoro’s Utilization report, which helps you monitor each team member’s actual or forecasted utilization for the given week, month, quarter or year. It makes it easier to estimate the team’s availability for new sprints/epics, re-assign tasks to balance out workloads, ensure feasible deadlines and make hiring decisions. Remember – use the Individual time allocation when assigning sprints/epics to keep your forecasts as accurate as possible.

Step 9: Monitor client and project profitability on the portfolio level

You can also use Scoro to monitor and analyze your projects across the portfolio to understand what types of projects generate the highest margin for your business. For this, head to the project list view. Filter out completed projects and add income, external cost, labor cost, and profit columns to the view to compare the actual results with the initial estimates and evaluate project performance.

You can also use the project list view to understand the profitability at a client level. First, include the profit column to see how much you are making from each project after deducting external cost and labor cost from the invoiced amount. Margin (profit %) helps you compare different projects. 

Then group the list by clients and summarize it to view the profitability by clients. To compare which clients bring in a margin that's above or below the average, add the Project profit % (actual) metric to the summary bar. 

These insights will help you make informed decisions about allocating your resources and prioritizing your customers for maximum profitability and success.