If your agency or consultancy bills clients from hours logged in Jira Cloud, you've hit the
wall: Jira cannot aggregate worklog entries for a date range natively.
JQL's worklogDate filters issues, not entries — you can find issues that
were worked on in March, but not "how many hours did we log for client X in March, entry by
entry, at what rate". Everyone solves this one of four ways.
Tempo is the category king: approvals, plans, capacity, accounts, everything. Two structural costs. First, pricing is per Jira user, site-wide — if your Jira has 200 users and 2 people run billing reports, you pay for 200. Second, it's a Marketplace app: an admin has to install it, which on locked-down enterprise instances means procurement, security review, and waiting. If your whole company standardizes on it, it's excellent. If you're a 5-person billing team inside someone else's Jira, it's overkill you may not even be allowed to install.
Cheaper per user, and some (like Clockwork's free tier) are genuinely good. The same two structural properties remain though: admin installation, and pricing per Jira user rather than per report consumer. Worth evaluating if you have admin rights and a cooperative site.
GET /rest/api/3/issue/{key}/worklog returns real entries with authors, timestamps
and durations. A script that walks issues from a JQL search and aggregates entries into a CSV
is an afternoon of work — plus rate tables, plus maintenance every time the API or your client
mapping changes, plus "only Deniz can run the script". Fine for one-offs; brittle as a monthly
invoicing ritual.
Worklog Ledger takes a different trade: it runs in your own browser with your existing Jira session, so there is nothing for an admin to approve and nothing installed on the Jira site. The weekly worklog calendar is free. The billing layer — project→client mapping, hourly rates, billable flags, grouped totals, invoice-ready CSV export — is $7/month for the person running reports only, not per Jira user. Because it talks directly to your own Jira site and has no backend, your worklog data never leaves your browser; the extension is open source, so that claim is checkable.
The honest limits: it's Chrome-family browsers and Jira Cloud only (no Data Center yet), it reads native Jira worklogs (Tempo-stored worklogs are on the roadmap), and it deliberately does less than Tempo — no approvals, no capacity planning. It does the export-to-invoice job.
| Tempo | Lighter apps | API script | Worklog Ledger | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Admin approval needed | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Who pays | Every Jira user | Every Jira user | Dev time | Report users only |
| Entry-level date-range export | Yes | Varies | DIY | Yes (CSV) |
| Rates & client mapping | Yes | Varies | DIY | Yes |
| Approvals / capacity planning | Yes | Some | No | No |
| Where your data goes | Vendor cloud | Vendor cloud | Your machine | Your browser |
Company-wide time management with approvals and finance integrations: Tempo, budget permitting. Admin rights and a modest budget: evaluate Clockwork. A one-time export: script it. A recurring invoicing ritual inside a Jira you don't control, where only one or two people need the report: that's the case we built Worklog Ledger for.