Connect Jira to timesheets: stop double-entering hours

The double-entry problem

In most IT services companies the hours already exist. Engineers log work in Jira — on the ticket, while it's fresh, because that's where the work lives. Then finance needs invoiceable hours per person per project, and every available path is bad:

• Ask engineers to log a second time in a timesheet tool. They won't — or they'll batch-guess the whole week on Friday, and the numbers will be fiction.
• Export Jira CSVs and massage them in a spreadsheet. Hours of accountant time, every month, with manual joins between Jira projects and billing projects.
• Invoice from the plan instead of actuals — and silently leak the difference between what was allocated and what was worked.

Double entry isn't just wasted minutes. Two systems of record for the same hours guarantee they disagree, and the disagreement surfaces at the worst possible moment: on an invoice a client is questioning.

One-way sync is the sane model

Helia's Jira integration is deliberately one-way: Jira → Helia. Logged work flows from Jira into Helia timesheets. Nothing flows back.

Two-way sync sounds nicer until you ask who wins a conflict. A manager corrects hours before invoicing — should the correction rewrite the engineer's worklog in Jira? If yes, your billing tool is silently editing engineering history. If no, the systems disagree again and you've rebuilt the original problem with extra moving parts.

One-way keeps the authority boundaries clean:

• Jira stays the source of truth for what engineers logged. No tool edits their worklogs behind their backs.
• Helia is the source of truth for what you bill. Corrections are a billing judgment — they happen on the billing side and stay there.
• Engineers change nothing. No new tool, no browser extension, no "please also fill in the timesheet" messages. If the ticket has logged work, the timesheet has hours.

Setup: connect, map, sync

Setup lives in Settings → Integrations → Jira and takes a few minutes:

1. Connect your Jira Cloud site. Sign in with Atlassian and pick the site. Helia only accepts sites on Atlassian's official cloud domain (a server-side allowlist) and requests read-only scopes for work logs — it can't write to your Jira even in principle.
2. Map projects. Point each Jira project you bill for at a Helia project — the same projects that drive capacity planning and invoicing. Unmapped Jira projects are ignored, so internal sandboxes never pollute timesheets.
3. Map people. Pair Jira accounts with Helia employees so hours land on the right person. A worklog only reaches timesheets when both its project and its author are mapped — there is no guessing.
4. Run the first sync. After that it runs nightly on its own (with a manual sync button for impatient weeks). Logged work arrives in Helia timesheets as draft entries — hours summed per person, per project, per day.

Review, correct, lock

Synced hours are drafts, not gospel. The weekly rhythm:

• Engineers keep logging in Jira. Their hours appear in Helia carrying a source flag, so you can always tell synced entries from hand-typed ones.
• The manager reviews the week. A double-logged ticket, a meeting logged to the wrong project, a 10-hour day that was really 6 — corrections happen here. The moment a human edits an entry, the entry is theirs: it's flagged as hand-edited and the sync will never overwrite it — not tonight, not ever.
• The manager locks the week. Locked hours are immutable: the sync can't touch them, employees can't edit them, and changes in Jira no longer affect them. What's locked is what happened.

This review-then-lock gate is what makes the data invoiceable. You never bill "whatever the sync last wrote" — you bill what a person reviewed and signed off.

From locked hours to the client invoice

Locked hours are the input to billing. At month-end, invoice generation reads locked timesheet hours per project — hours × rate on time-and-materials projects, actuals against the flat amount on retainers — and drafts invoices from what actually happened, not from a stale allocation plan.

The chain, end to end: an engineer logs a ticket in Jira → the hours appear in Helia → the manager reviews and locks the week → the invoice drafts itself from locked hours. One point of entry, one review gate, zero re-typing.

The billing half of that chain — models, where hours leak, the one-hour month-end ritual — is its own guide: from timesheets to client invoices.

Limits and honest notes

• Jira Cloud only, today. The integration talks to Atlassian's cloud API; self-hosted Jira Server / Data Center isn't supported.
• You don't need Tempo. The sync reads Jira's native worklogs — the built-in "log work" on every issue. No time-tracking plugin required.
• One-way means one-way. Corrections made in Helia never appear in Jira. Jira answers "what did engineering log", Helia answers "what do we bill" — those are allowed to differ, and the source flag shows you where they do.
• Hand edits always win. A synced entry that a human edited is never overwritten by a later sync. A locked week is never touched at all.
• Deleted worklogs are honored — until you lock. If a worklog is deleted in Jira, the corresponding draft hours disappear on the next sync. Once the week is locked, deletions in Jira no longer change it.
• Timezones. Jira worklog timestamps are normalized to the workspace day — an entry lands on the calendar day it was started per the worklog's own timestamp. Teams spread across timezones should spot-check the first synced week and agree where the around-midnight cases should land.

FAQ

Do engineers need to sign in to Helia for their hours to sync?

No. Their Jira account needs to be mapped to a Helia employee — that's all. They keep logging work in Jira exactly as before; nothing about their day changes.

Some of our people don't use Jira at all. Does that break anything?

No — mixed teams are the normal case. Hand-entered and synced hours live in the same timesheet, distinguished by the source flag. Designers type their hours, engineers sync theirs, and the manager reviews one week either way.

Can a nightly sync overwrite a correction the manager made?

No. Editing an entry flags it as hand-edited, and the sync skips hand-edited entries permanently. Locked weeks are immutable to the sync regardless of source.

We bill some projects fixed-price. Should we still sync their hours?

Yes. On fixed-price work the hours don't drive the invoice — they tell you whether the fixed price is still profitable. That's a different question, and you still can't answer it without the hours.

How much of our Jira can the integration see?

It uses read-only scopes and touches worklogs plus the minimal issue and project metadata needed to place them. It never writes to Jira, and it only syncs from projects you explicitly mapped.