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Time entry approval workflow

Question

Can worklogs be approved by project instead of per team?

Answer

As you know, timesheets can be sent for approval to a team lead with the permission to review and approve (or reject) a timesheet. Timesheets can only be approved as a whole for the configured period (week or month). But what if you need to add an additional layer of approval to ensure that revenue recognition and project deadlines are being adhered to?

Implementing an approval process for your worklogs on a Jira project level can be achieved with a Jira workflow.

In the workflow above we added two Jira issue statuses before the resolved status: "Timesheet review" and "Timesheet approved”.  Adding the Jira property key "jira.permission.work.denied" to these statuses with the property value of “denied” will ensure that users can no longer log time against the issue when it is in one of these statuses. This property key should also be applied to the status of resolved.

Your workflow configuration will look like this when complete:

The Tempo log time section in the Jira issue will be hidden when the issue is set to one of these statuses. Note that the a worklog can be modified from within the user timesheet when the issue is in this status, but no new worklogs can be created, so ideally the issue is transitioned to this status after all timesheets have been submitted.

Users who attempt to log time against an issue in a restricted state will see an error message.

You also have the option to add to your notification scheme that this workflow transition triggers an email to your project manager to review the work on the Jira issue. Click here for information on how to do that. 

And as with any workflow, you can restrict who transitions the workflow from status to status. Click here for information on how to do that. 

It is important to note that worklogs are displayed within Tempo reports regardless of whether or not they have been approved, and there is no indication within the report of the approval status. The approval status of a worklog can only be retrieved from the worklog servlet (using the addApprovalStatus=true parameter).