Hourward support

Last updated 22 August 2026

Where Hourward is on a work item

The panel is not shown by default — Jira hides app panels behind a button. On the work item, click the Apps button under the title (the small round icon between the + and the layout icon), then choose Hourward. It opens above the Activity section, and Jira remembers it for the next work item.

The + menu and the … menu do not list it; it is the third button.

Before writing: the self-check

Jira settings → Apps → Hourward → Self-check → Run the check. It reports what Hourward can actually reach on your site. Nothing outside a site can answer that — an app and a person get different answers from the same Jira URL — so pasting the result into your message usually saves a round trip.

Things that are expected behaviour, not faults

Some names are missing from a CSV export

Jira answers for fifty people at a time and Hourward asks for at most two hundred, so a very wide export can run past it. The download tells you how many people it could not name, and every row still carries the account id — the column a payroll system joins on.

Time logged a moment ago is briefly missing from a report

Jira’s search index lags a write by a second or two. Your own timesheet works around it by asking for the issue directly; a dashboard gadget refreshed instantly may not. Refresh again.

Hourward cannot log time on somebody’s behalf

No timer running on a server, no bulk import attributed to a person. This is deliberate. Any entry written without a person behind it would belong to the app, and would then disappear from Jira’s own worklogAuthor searches. It is the defect I built this app to avoid, so I will not add it.

A week you approved shows different hours

Jira lets a worklog be edited at any time, including inside an approved week, and no app can prevent that. Hourward compares the total now against the total claimed at submission and tells you when they differ, rather than pretending the approval still describes what is there. It says nothing about drift on a week it could not read in full — a partial read totals less than what is there, and reporting that as a change would be inventing one.

Hourward’s own screens will not write into a locked week

Submitted or approved, and it is the week the date you pick falls in that counts — not just the week you are looking at. Jira’s native worklog screens can still write there; that is Jira’s behaviour, not Hourward’s, and the drift line above is what catches it.

Hourward will not switch Jira’s time tracking provider for you

That needs Jira administration permission, which the app deliberately does not ask for. The settings screen tells you where the switch is — and Hourward works perfectly well with Jira’s own time tracking left exactly as it is.

An entry you cannot see in a report

Hourward reads Jira as you. If Jira would not show you an issue, Hourward does not show you its hours either — and it says how many issues it could not read rather than quietly leaving them out. That number is the useful clue.

If you stop paying

Atlassian takes the app’s screens away when a licence lapses — that is the platform’s behaviour and no app can change it.

You keep every hour. They are in Jira’s own worklogs, in the tool you already own, and Hourward never had a copy to hand back. There is no export to run and nobody to ask. That is the point of building it this way.

Reporting something that looks like a security problem

[email protected]. Please include what you did and what you saw; I will confirm receipt and tell you what I find.