How to use Fair Hours

For Fair Hours on Jira Cloud — updated 16 August 2026

Fair Hours answers one question: what did the time logged in this project, this month, actually cost? It reads the hours your team already logs in Jira, applies your hourly rates and your rules for overtime, weekends and night work, and shows the result by person or by issue. It can also log and correct time, and mark a month as approved.

It runs entirely inside Atlassian. There is no server of ours, no account to create and no data leaving your site. Hours are written into Jira's own worklog, as the person, so they stay usable by Jira's own search and reports — and stay yours if you ever remove the app.

1. Getting started (five minutes)

Open Fair Hours from the Jira apps menu.
The first time, it asks for your currency and one hourly rate for the company. That single rate is enough to produce a full report — nobody has to type a rate per person to get started.
Pick a project and a month, and the report appears.
Later, refine: a rate for a team, a rate for an individual, and what counts as overtime, weekend or night work.

2. The report

Two views of the same month, chosen at the top:

One line per person — who logged how many hours and what that cost.
One line per issue (rolls up to the epic) — child issues add into their parent, so an epic shows the whole cost underneath it, not just time logged on the epic itself.

Click a person's name to open their detail window: one line per worklog, with the date, what was done, the hours and the cost. The issue appears by name, not just its key, and the sentence the person wrote when logging is shown underneath. Where a line was paid differently, the reason is written on it — for example weekend ×1.5 · €38.25/h.

Does it match Jira?

Under the table, the app states its own reconciliation: the hours it priced against the hours Jira reports for the same period. If anything could not be read — a page of results that failed, a project it was refused — it says so and does not claim the totals match. A cost report that quietly comes out short is worse than one that admits a gap.

Export

Export to spreadsheet produces the rows currently on screen, ready to paste into Excel or Google Sheets. The column order never changes between versions, so a spreadsheet you build on top of it keeps working.

3. Rates — the part that makes it fair

A rate is never a single number frozen in time. Every rate has an effective date, so you can schedule a rise for next month or correct the past without rewriting what was already costed. There are three levels, and the most specific one wins:

Level	Where	Used when
Person	Settings → People	That person has their own rate
Team	Settings → Teams	They are in a Jira group that has a rate
Company	Settings → top of the panel	Everyone else

If someone is in two teams that both have a rate, the app does not pick silently: the team you placed first pays, and a message on screen names the person and says which team is paying. Move up and Move down change that order.

Teams are found through Jira's own group search, so there is no separate list of people to maintain. A group renamed in Jira keeps its rate.

4. What counts as extra

In Settings → What counts as extra you set your own rules. All of them start switched off (multiplier 1.0), so nothing is invented behind your back.

Setting	What it does
Standard day	Hours beyond this, on a weekday, are overtime. Counted per day, across all worklogs of that day — not per entry.
Overtime rate	Multiplier applied to those extra hours (for example 1.5).
Saturday / Sunday rate	Multiplier for every hour of that day. Weekend hours are paid at the weekend rate rather than being split into overtime.
Night window and night rate	The night premium is an addition on top of what the hour already earned, for the part of the shift falling inside the window (for example 22:00–06:00).
Night on weekends	Off by default: whether the night premium also applies on a Saturday or Sunday, or whether the weekend rate alone covers it.

How a number is calculated, exactly

Each worklog is cut at midnight, so a shift running from 22:00 to 02:00 pays four hours split across two days — each side using the rate and the rules of its own day.
For each day, the hourly rate is the one in force on that date at the most specific level that applies (person, then team, then company).
Weekday hours up to the standard day are paid at ×1; hours beyond it at the overtime multiplier. On a Saturday or Sunday, every hour is paid at that day's multiplier instead.
Any part of the shift inside the night window adds the night premium on top.
Money is kept at full precision through the whole calculation and rounded only when it is displayed, so a hundred small lines still add up to the same total as the sum of the month.

5. Logging and correcting time

Log time at the top opens a small form: find the issue through Jira's own search, pick the day, type how long (1.5, 1:30 and 1h 30m all work), optionally the time it started, and what was done.

Inside a person's detail window, every line has Fix and Delete. Fix re-reads the entry from Jira at that moment, so two people editing the same day cannot silently overwrite each other. Delete asks for confirmation and says what goes and what stays.

After anything is written, the app shows three honest lists: what was written, what Jira refused with Jira's own reason, and what did not change at all. Nothing is reported as saved unless Jira accepted it.

Time is always logged as you, never in the app's name — that is what keeps Jira's own search and reports correct.
The remaining estimate is never touched. Planning numbers stay with the team.
Your Jira permissions decide what you may do: editing or deleting someone else's worklog needs the matching Jira permission, and the app checks that on the server.

6. Approving a month

An administrator of the project can press Close this month. That records who approved it, when, and the totals at that moment. While a month is closed, Fair Hours will not log, correct or delete time inside it — including a correction that would move an entry out of it.

Closing does not freeze the report. It is rebuilt from Jira's worklogs every time it is opened, and if the reality moves after the approval the screen says so in plain words — for example: "Since then, Jira has 1.00 h more (€40.00). The month now stands at 29.00 h." That is deliberate: a locked report that hides later changes is how cost figures drift away from the truth.

Reopen this month undoes the approval and deletes the approval record.

7. Who sees what

Money is visible to Jira administrators. Everyone else sees the hours, and sees that a line was weekend or overtime, but no rates and no costs — the server sends the answer without them, and a short note explains why they are missing.
Changing rates and settings requires Jira administrator rights.
Approving or reopening a month requires being an administrator of that project.
The app can only ever see what the person using it could see in Jira.

8. Known limits — what the app does not do

It is not payroll. No payslips, no income tax, no social contributions, no country-specific rules. It prices hours with the rates and multipliers you enter.
It is not invoicing. There is no customer, no invoice number and no VAT.
One project at a time. The report covers a project and a month; a portfolio view across projects is not there yet.
Rules are per site, not per project. The standard day and the multipliers apply everywhere; only the rates vary by person and team.
No budgets or forecasts. It reports what happened, not what should happen.
Public holidays are not a premium. A holiday is treated as the weekday or weekend it falls on.
It does not create or deactivate users, groups, issues or projects, and writes nothing into Jira except worklogs.

9. Getting help

Email support@saoirsesoftware.com — in English, on business days, replies within two business days. Emails reach the person who writes the code.

See also the Privacy Policy, the Terms of Service and the Data Processing Agreement.