If your time tracking tool only supports engineering workflows, your audit trail is already broken.
The Engineering-Finance Divide Starts With Time
Most technical teams already log time, just not in a way that finance can use.
Whether it's Jira issues and tickets, Confluence sprint summaries, or GitHub commit histories, engineering leaders know what their teams are doing. That's great for velocity.
But when it's time to capitalize costs or prepare for an audit, finance is left sifting through user activity logs, backfilling tasks, and estimating hours retroactively. Using Jira for audits is not ideal. Obtaining, organizing, and categorizing Jira user logs to construct an accurate picture for auditors (on schedule) is not for the faint of heart, and it may even introduce security and compliance gaps to the audit process.
Insufficient Records and Logs Create Risk
Jira and its available add-on tools serve technical teams well for project roles, user management, issue monitoring, project permissions, and overall efficiency. But Jira wasn't designed to be a system for failsafe audit logging. And in some cases, using it as such increases risk and downstream effort instead of reducing it.
When finance must access and decipher Jira issues to prepare for an audit, it slows everything down. Engineering gets pulled back in, and the loop of communications seems endless as the date of an upcoming audit looms.
What an Audit Log Actually Requires
Basic time tracking is a step in the right direction. But more specifically, auditors want:
- Who did the work
- When it was done
- What project or phase it supported
- Whether it was capitalizable or expensed
- How it ties to payroll and GL categories
Expert Perspective on Audit Requirements
As Katie Owen, Audit Director with over 10 years of audit experience at Sensiba LLP, says
"Clear, detailed documentation is crucial for a successful audit. A critical first step is ensuring that finance and engineering teams are aligned on each other's needs. From there, implementing the right processes and discipline around time and project tracking make all the difference."
Time Logging Alignment
So while engineering may continue to log activity in Jira, clear alignment on the level of security, organization of data, and mechanisms to authenticate the audit log entries between both departments is crucial.
Jira and many of its available plug-ins might show what issues were closed. But they rarely offer visibility into properties like whether the project logged was in service new feature, product maintenance, or R&D-eligible projects. Jira certainly doesn't provide the clean data and verified audit log demanded throughout audit procedures.
The False Sense of Security That Fails Finance
Engineering-led project tools like Jira often create a dangerous illusion: "We're tracking time. We're good."
But a first audit can reveal all the gaps that time system failed to capture. The way a company performs in second, third, or twenty-second audit events can reveal further costs of fragmented audit log data as finance time is poured into audit prep season after season. For example, this drain in managing an incomplete audit log can look like:
- Rebuilding timelines from disconnected Jira issues
- Manually estimating work that happened 9 months ago based on an incomplete set of log data
- Arguing over whether a bug fix or other issue-level Jira entries were capitalizable
- Tedious Jira project log export
- Vague layers of control and accountability as finance manipulates an engineering-first system to construct an audit log
It Doesn't Have to Be a Tradeoff
Since finance and engineering operate separately day-to-day, it's easy to assume that one team's tooling will always come at the expense of the other's. But it creates a false dichotomy to assume that the two user groups have inherently opposing objectives. In fact, both engineering and financial leadership are after the same sets of information from Jira (or other project management tools). All that's required is creating a system that efficiently captures logs in ways that are useful for each team's reporting.
When it comes to the time log used in an audit trail, the challenge isn't creating new data sets to meet the needs of both departments. The information is already there. Rather, it's simply a question of understanding each one's needs to make a few intelligent configuration changes. A simple tooling modification can help both groups navigate audit preparation seamlessly.
Marrying the Audit Log with Jira Workflows
A shared solution for both engineering efficiency and audit log backup must do three things well:
- Fit naturally into the engineering user's process and workflow in Jira: no duplicate project entry or extra system fields to log
- Capture the financial user's context and workflow: log project phase, GL code, or CapEx/OpEx classification, all with proper security measures in place
- Translate events between the two sets of users to create an audit log without requiring engineers to think like accountants
With the ClickTime app, technical teams never have to disrupt aggressive execution to think about whether their project is capitalizable. Engineering teams need not disrupt workflows to manage project permissions, audit log details, or authenticate properties. They use their calendar or Jira to translate directly to hours worked.
Meanwhile, finance applies its own layer of logic to customize the data export and ensure that each new hour recorded is routed to the appropriate cost center. Time entries roll into payroll, and reports stay aligned with both the GL categories and audit requirements. An audit log is automatically generated, incorporating data from the Jira cloud and primed for financial analysis ahead of an audit.
This way, engineers can keep working and nobody is stuck rebuilding history or adjusting tedious entries at the end of the quarter.
The Bottom Line for Jira Audits
Velocity is an important engineering metric. It needn't be sacrificed. But activity logging in Jira that serves engineering without a system to support finance in an audit creates risk rather than enforcing the controls required by audit events.
When valuation, compliance, an audit, or an M&A event creates a dependency on access to clean labor documentation, no one can afford to rely on sprint tools alone.
Explore how ClickTime's solution bridges engineering and finance workflows without adding overhead here.
