Timesheets for Jira that keep no copy of your hours

Name: Hourward
Author: Growing Peas

Time logged through Hourward is written straight into Jira’s own worklogs, under the name of the person who typed it. There is no vendor copy, because the app never makes one.

Jira Cloud · free up to 10 users

Hourward is in review on the Atlassian Marketplace, so there is no install button here yet. Write to [email protected] and I will tell you the day it is listed.

The copy is the problem, not the timesheet

Every other timesheet app for Jira copies your team’s hours onto its vendor’s servers. That copy is what turns a timesheet into a data-processing question: a DPA to sign, a sub-processor to register, a security questionnaire to fill in, and one more place your employees’ working patterns live.

Hourward does not make the copy. It moves Jira’s own Time spent field, it shows up in Jira’s own reports, and it answers to Jira’s own JQL — worklogAuthor = currentUser() finds it, because it really is theirs. The app stores no hours, no names and no email addresses: only whether a week has been submitted and approved, which is the one thing Jira has no place for.

It runs entirely on Atlassian’s infrastructure, in your site’s own region, and it declares no egress permission at all — which is what makes it eligible for Atlassian’s Runs on Atlassian programme, where the platform itself tells your administrators if an update ever changes that.

A week, filled in and totalled

Hourward's weekly grid: five Jira issues down the left, Monday to Sunday across the top, hours in the cells, a day total row and a week total of 23h 47m of 40h, with a Submit this week button. — One row per issue, one column per day, and the week’s state in the corner. `1h 30m`, `1h30`, `90m` and `1:30` all work, and the form shows what it understood before you commit it. Jira’s own working day and week settings are read from your site, so “1d” means what it means to you.

Time can also be logged from the issue you are already on, without leaving it — which is where most of it actually gets recorded.

Submitted, and approved by somebody else

A week is submitted, and a manager approves it or sends it back with a reason. Nobody can approve their own week, approver or not. Once a week is submitted or approved it is closed to Hourward’s own screens — whichever week the date you pick falls in, not just the one you are looking at.

And it will not pretend an approved week is unchanged when it is not. Jira lets a worklog be edited at any time and no app can prevent that; Hourward compares the total now against the total claimed at submission, and says when they differ.

Reports, and a CSV your finance team can use

Hourward's report tab: a bar per Jira issue over the last 30 days, each labelled with its issue key and summary and totalled on the right, above a 24h 32m total, with a Download CSV button. — By person, project, issue or day, over any range. The export carries both the account id a payroll system joins on and the name a human checks.

It will not touch your Jira’s settings

Hourward's settings screen: the list of approvers, an optional paragraph explaining where in Jira an administrator can switch the time tracking provider, a self-check button, and a statement of what the app can reach. — Jira can be told to route *Log work* through Hourward instead of its own screen, but that needs Jira administration permission — which Hourward deliberately does not ask for. The settings screen tells you where the switch is and leaves it to you. Hourward works perfectly well with Jira’s own time tracking left exactly as it is.

What it deliberately does not do

It cannot log time on someone’s behalf. No server-side timer, no bulk import attributed to a person. Anything written without a person behind it would belong to the app rather than to them, and would then vanish from Jira’s own worklog searches. That is the defect this app exists to avoid, so it is not coming.
It will not switch Jira’s time tracking provider for you, for the permission reason above.
It does not import your history from another tool. Hours already sitting in a vendor’s database stay there; Hourward starts from the day you install it.

If you stop paying, you keep every hour

The screens go — Atlassian takes them, and no app can change that. The hours stay: they are in Jira’s own worklogs, in the tool you already own, and Hourward never had a copy to hand back. No export to run, nobody to ask.

Price

Free up to 10 users, permanently — not a trial. Above that it is paid per user and billed by Atlassian with the rest of your bill; the figure for your own user count will be on the Marketplace pricing tab, which is where the prices actually live.

Who makes it

I do — one person, on my own, under the name Growing Peas. There is no support desk behind this page: mail arrives at [email protected] and I answer it myself, usually the same day. If something is broken, say so plainly and I would rather hear it than not.

The support page covers the built-in self-check and the behaviours that look like faults but are not, and privacy says exactly what is stored — which is very little. Security covers how the app is built, what it can reach, and how to report a vulnerability.