Burn rate and run-out date for a Jira project

A budget is a number that goes down. The useful question is not how much is left, but when it will be gone. That is what burn rate and run-out date answer, and Jira has the raw material for both without giving you either.

The definitions

• Burn rate: money (or hours) spent per day or per week. In Jira terms, logged time multiplied by the hourly rate of whoever logged it.
• Run-out date: today plus remaining budget divided by burn rate. If 12,000 is left and the team burns 400 a day, the money lasts 30 days.
• Remaining estimates: the burn rate says how fast you are spending, not how much work is left. Pricing the Remaining estimate of open work items tells you what finishing will cost, which you can hold against what is left.

The burn rate should come from recent weeks, not from the whole project. A project that crawled for two months and then got a full team has a very different pace today than its average.

For the cost side (rates, dated rate changes, budgets per epic or version), see How to see project cost and budget in Jira from worklogs. This article is about the forecast on top.

Native and manual ways

Time tracking report

Jira's time tracking report shows original estimate, remaining estimate and time spent per work item for a project or version. Good for a quick look at hours. It has no rates, no dates for the pace, and no budget to compare with.

Export plus spreadsheet

1. Pull the individual worklogs (author, date, time spent) through the REST API, or export work items with their time fields.
2. Price each worklog with a rates table.
3. Sum the cost of the last 28 days and divide by 28. That is your daily burn rate.
4. Run-out date: =TODAY() + remaining / burn_per_day.
5. For the estimate view: sum the Remaining estimate of open work items, multiply by an average hourly rate, add to spent.

This works, and it is the right way to learn what the numbers mean. Each step is easy; the trouble is keeping it alive.

Dashboard gadgets

A Filter results gadget can list time spent and remaining estimate per work item, but the built-in gadgets count work items rather than total hours, so totals still mean an export. Either way it is hours, not money, and the gadgets do not know your budget or your pace.

Where it stops working

• The sheet is stale as soon as someone logs time or moves work between epics.
• A 28-day window needs a daily recompute. Nobody does that by hand.
• The first week of a month or project gives a pace that swings wildly. You need a rule for when to trust it.
• A run-out date after the budget period ends is not interesting. A formula happily prints it anyway.
• Rates are sensitive, and the people who should see a run-out date are rarely the people who should see what each colleague costs.

Burnrate

Full disclosure: we build Burnrate. Burnrate for Jira reads the worklogs your team already logs, prices them with a dated rate card and compares them with a budget. This is how its forecast works, taken from how we built it:

• Pace is the average daily spend over the last 28 days, or over the days since the period started if that is shorter.
• Run-out date is the money (or hours) left divided by that pace. If the budget has both an amount and hours, the earlier of the two wins.
• It only shows a date that falls inside the budget's period. If the pace would not use the budget up in time, you see the projected total at the end of the period instead.
• It waits until there are enough days to forecast from: 7 days of pace, or half the period for budgets shorter than two weeks.
• Estimate at completion is spent so far plus the Remaining estimates of open work, priced at the scope's average cost per hour. It is a separate figure from the run-out date, so you can see both views, and for one-off budgets a budget is marked at risk if either points over it.
• A budget is flagged At risk when usage passes your warning threshold or the forecast goes over the budget.

It does not email you about it, and it has no dashboard gadget yet. You see the forecast in the budget list and on each budget.

For one project and a monthly look, the spreadsheet above is enough. When several budgets run at once and you want the run-out date to be current when you open the page, that is the part worth handing over.

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