User guide

Burnwise lives in Jira. Open Apps → Burnwise, and its pages appear in Jira’s sidebar: Home, Projects, My timesheet, Team, Reports, Invoices, Notifications and Settings. Every page has a How do I…? button with short answers for that page.

For administrators: first setup (5 minutes)

1. Open Apps → Burnwise. The setup wizard asks for the company currency, the working week, your roles with their default cost and billing rates, and how far back to import worklogs. 90 days is a good start; projects always import all of their own worklogs when you create them.
2. In Settings → Rates & roles, give people their role, or paste a CSV with the columns email,role,cost_rate,billing_rate,effective_date, check the preview, and click Apply import. Add a rate for one person, one client or one project only where it differs.
3. In Settings → Access, make the people who manage rates and invoices Finance administrators. Jira site administrators are always app administrators.
4. In Settings → Teams, add your teams and their managers. Managers approve timesheets and see how much of their team’s time is billable.

A raise never changes old projects. Add a new rate with the date the raise starts; worklogs before that date keep the old rate. To correct a rate that was wrong from the start, click Edit next to it and tick Fix a mistake (changes past numbers too).

For finance and project managers

• Home shows what needs you first: Needs attention (each item says why it is there), this month at a glance, Ready to bill, and Hours not ready when people have missing time.
• New project: Projects → New project. Pick the Jira work (a whole Jira project, one or more Epics, a Jira filter (JQL) or single issues), how the client pays (hourly, fixed fee, retainer, milestones or internal), the budget, the project managers and the alerts. Burnwise imports every worklog in that work in the background.
• The project page has tabs. Overview shows health, money so far, budget spent against work done, and the expected cost at the finish; click ⓘ next to a number to see the calculation with the real values. Breakdown goes from Epic or person down to single worklogs. Budget holds budget change requests, which a finance administrator approves. Expenses, Alerts and Trend are next to them, and Settings holds the project’s own options and worklog export.
• Invoices: pick a project and a period, check the lines by role, person or issue, click Export CSV, and send the invoice from your accounting tool. Then click Mark as billed and enter the invoice number, so the hours are not billed twice.
• Reports: 15 ready-made reports, such as Client profitability and Budget vs forecast, plus Build a report for your own. Export any report as CSV.

For everyone

• My timesheet: click the day on an issue row and type the hours: 1.5, 1h 30m, 90m or 1:30. Press Enter and Burnwise saves the worklog in Jira. Add issue adds a row, Start timer times your work, and Copy last week repeats last week’s rows. Check the daily totals, then click Submit week to send it to your team lead for approval.
• Billable or not: click the hours to open the day, then turn Billable off for a worklog the client does not pay for.
• Notifications: budget alerts, approvals and missing-time reminders appear under Notifications. Click one to open the project.

Alerts

Each project has alert switches under Alerts: Budget milestones (50%, 75%, 90% and 100% of the budget), Expected to go over budget, and Low expected margin with a limit you set. An alert names the Epic that caused it, where there is one.

Alerts appear in Burnwise under Notifications. To get budget, expected-cost and margin alerts by email too, open Notifications, turn on Email me alerts and check the address (Burnwise suggests the one on your Jira profile). Turn the switch off to stop the emails. See Security and data for what an alert email contains.

Keeping pay rates private

With Keep pay rates private on, project managers see project totals but never one person’s cost rate. Groups of fewer than 3 people are hidden, so a rate cannot be worked out. How the numbers are calculated explains the rule.