People need Jira calculated fields for forecasting project timelines, tracking expenditure and time spent, making project management decisions, and more.
But does Jira actually offer calculated fields? Nope!
Instead, users have to create Jira automation rules to do dynamic custom calculations, pull their data out of Jira into a familiar platform like Excel, or augment their Jira with an Atlassian Marketplace app.
Let’s explore these options for combining and calculating Jira field values so you can decide which is best for you.
What are Jira calculated fields?
Out of the box, there’s no such thing as a Jira calculated field. (Thanks, Atlassian!)
In theory, though, they are Jira custom fields where instead of the user inputting a value, the value is calculated and inputted for you. The value is calculated based on other Jira fields; so you enter 6 in one field and 2 in another, and the Jira calculated field multiplies the two and inputs a value of 12. And the calculated field is dynamic, so if you change the fields it’s calculating, it will automatically recalculate and update the value.
Why you might need a Jira calculated field
You might want a Jira calculated field to help with estimating and prioritizing your tasks. Let’s say you’re using the ICE (impact, confidence, ease) method. For each of your Jira issues, you assign a numerical value of 1-10 to the three factors of impact, confidence, and ease. To get your ICE score, you multiply the three factors.
To achieve this on a Jira issue, you’d need to create three custom number fields and input values for them. Then you’d need a calculated custom field to multiply those fields and give you the ICE score.
Alternatively, you might want to calculate labor costs on a task. In this case, you’d make custom fields for recording “work hours” and “hourly rate” and you’d need a Jira calculated custom field to multiply the two.
You may also want to do more complex calculations for quantitative risk analysis and deciding on what security solutions to invest in.
Let’s say you want to work out your loss expectancy over the year, i.e. how much money you’ll lose on your assets because of security threats and other problems. And let’s say you need to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of implementing security controls and safeguards to prevent that loss.
All the available Jira fields are for qualitative risk analysis, so you’d need to create a series of custom fields for a quantitative assessment, specifically: “asset value”, “exposure factor”, “annualized rate of occurrence”, and “cost of control”. However, you’d also need a Jira calculated field to do all the math in one go, specifically:
Asset value x exposure factor = single loss expectancy
Single loss expectancy x annualized rate of occurrence = annualized loss expectancy
(Annualized loss expectancy – cost of control) / cost of control = ROI
How to calculate Jira custom fields
As I said earlier, there’s technically no way of creating a Jira calculated field based on other fields natively.
You therefore have three options.
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Do it outside of Jira
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Use a Jira automation workaround
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Use an Atlassian Marketplace app that offers calculated custom fields
Let’s take each of these in turn.
Option 1: Export your data
You could export your Jira data to a tool like Microsoft Excel and do the calculations there. You can do this out of the box, but it’s cumbersome and limited and you have to manually calculate your field values once they’re in the spreadsheet. You’d be better off using an app like Better Excel Exporter for Jira, which calculates custom field values automatically during the export process.
However, if you’re looking for a calculated field in Jira, this isn’t it. Although Better Excel Exporter calls them “Jira calculated fields”, these are calculated fields in Excel, not Jira. Your new values would live in Excel and would have to be imported manually back into Jira. Your single source of truth dies a meaningless death.
Also, Better Excel Exporter will only calculate the fields when you export. If your source values change, your calculated values won’t update unless you run the export again and create a new file. It’s not a dynamic process, which is what users really want.
Option 2: Jira automation
You can do dynamic custom field calculations in Jira by using Jira automation. So, you can configure automation rules to update Jira fields based on other field values. However, setting up these rules is time-consuming and easy to get wrong. For simple calculations in particular, it’s often more trouble that it’s worth.
Another problem is that there are limits on how many times Jira automation rules can be executed per month. On the free and standard plans, there’s a limit of 100 executions and 500 executions respectively for all global and multi-project rules. On the premium plan, there’s a limit of 1,000 executions per user. Therefore, if you need to do a lot of calculations regularly on your Jira tickets, Jira automation isn’t the answer.
Ultimately, this method of calculating Jira custom fields is called a workaround for a reason. It doesn’t achieve what users really want, which is to have a Jira calculated custom field that looks and functions just like any other Jira field.
Option 3: the advanced formula field from Awesome Custom Fields
To avoid the rigmarole and uncertainty that comes with exporting data to external tools or configuring Jira automation rules, you’ll need an app from the Atlassian Marketplace.
There are a bunch of apps that offer calculated Jira custom fields. However, most don’t offer custom calculations, i.e. the ability to add/subtract/multiply any custom number field. For that you’ll need Awesome Custom Fields, which adds a wide range of flexible custom fields to your Jira. These enhance Jira project management and visualization on issues, and allow you to overcome a number of native Jira limitations—such as calculating fields.
The advanced formula field that comes with Awesome Custom Fields allows users to perform custom calculations on issues in a straightforward way. You have to use Jira expressions to create your formulas, but if you’re a Jira expressions novice, there’s an autocomplete function that will help. Simply type “issue.” and a list of recommended number fields will appear, allowing you to select the custom fields you want to calculate.
Looking at our quantitative risk analysis example above, you could create an advanced formula field that calculates the ROI of implementing security controls. First you’d create custom fields for “asset value”, “exposure factor”, “annualized rate of occurrence” and “cost of control”. Then you’d input the following Jira expressions when configuring your calculated field:
(({{issue.AssetValue}} * {{issue.ExposureFactor}} * {{issue.AnnualizedRateOfOccurrence}}) – {{issue.CostOfControl}}) / {{issue.CostOfControl}}
You can also set the display size and color of the new value. For example, if you’re prioritizing tasks based on ICE, you might want to use classic RAG (red, amber, green) colors to highlight the tasks that should be worked on first, i.e. values below 250 are green, values between 250 and 750 are amber, and values above 750 are red. This makes it clear as soon as you open an issue how important the work is.
The other benefit of Awesome Custom Fields is that you get a whole bunch of other custom fields as well. These include T-shirt sizes for quicker and more visual estimation, color labels for drawing attention to certain attributes on issues, and cascading select lists for more accurate issue categorization.
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To summarize (TL;DR)
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If you want a Jira calculated field based on other fields, native Jira won’t help you.
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Jira calculated fields help project managers make better-informed decisions on better data, e.g. task prioritization using ICE and keeping track of labor costs.
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One way of getting a calculated value is to export your Jira field data and do the calculations externally. But your calculated values won’t dynamically update and your data has to live separately in two places.
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Another way of getting dynamic calculated values is to use Jira automation. But Jira automation is not for the faint of heart! And there are limits on how many calculations you can do per month.
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An Atlassian Marketplace app like Awesome Custom Fields lets you do custom calculations by combining multiple field values and applying various operators using Jira expressions. It also lets you display the value of your calculated field with a custom size and color. The extension for Jira Service Management users allows the same fields to be added to service requests by IT agents and their customers.
If you want actual calculated fields on your Jira issues, not fields that rely on unwieldy automation rules, try Awesome Custom Fields free for a month or book a personal demo.