Documentation

Install and get started

Requirements: Jira Cloud with time tracking enabled, and a Jira site admin to install the app. MarginRadar reads native Jira worklogs. If your team logs time in a separate time-tracking app, enable that app's sync to Jira worklogs so MarginRadar can see the hours.

1. Install. Open MarginRadar on Atlassian Marketplace and choose Try it free (30-day trial), or find it in the Atlassian Marketplace from inside Jira.
2. Enable time tracking in your Jira projects, so worklogs exist to be calculated.
3. Set rate cards. Add cost and billable rates (see Rates).
4. Create a project budget (see Budgets).
5. Look at the numbers. Open the MarginRadar page of the project, add the Budget risk gadget to a dashboard, or ask Rovo (Advanced).

The admin page has a Get started checklist: turn on time tracking, set rate cards and set a project budget, plus an optional fourth step to ask Rovo or add the dashboard gadget. A step is ticked once MarginRadar sees the data for it.

If a project already has worklogs, use the Import worklogs button on the project page so past worklogs are counted and the project shows numbers on day one.

Where you will find MarginRadar in Jira:

• Project page (Budget & profitability) with usage, budget details, epic risk, rates, and the Import worklogs, Export and Settings buttons.
• Issue and epic panel showing cost to date, hours, budget usage and margin.
• Budget risk gadget for Jira dashboards, listing projects with a budget and their status Advanced
• Admin settings with General, Currencies, Roles, People, Project rates, Clients, Access, Audit log and Data controls.
• MarginRadar agent in Rovo chat Advanced

MarginRadar supports Jira's light and dark themes.

Currency

MarginRadar uses a single base currency per site: USD, EUR, GBP, PLN, AUD, CAD or CHF. Choose it under General in the admin settings before you add rates. All rates, budgets, costs and revenue are in that currency, and MarginRadar does not convert between currencies.

Under Currencies you can pick an optional display currency and enter the exchange rate yourself. MarginRadar then shows converted totals next to the base-currency figures. It does not fetch exchange rates from anywhere.

Rates

Cost is calculated as native Jira worklogs × rate cards. Revenue is hours × billable rate, or a fixed price (Advanced).

Each rate has a cost rate (what an hour costs you) and a billable rate (what you charge). Set them on the admin pages Roles (rates by role, for example Senior Developer, Designer, QA), People (assign each person a role, or override their rates) and Project rates (overrides for one project, or a default for the project).

When more than one rate applies to a worklog, the most specific one wins, in this order:

1. Project rate for the person
2. Project rate for the person's role
3. Site-wide rate for the person
4. Site-wide rate for the person's role
5. Project default rate
6. Site default rate

Effective dates. Every rate has a start date and keeps its history. A rate change never rewrites last month's numbers: worklogs are priced with the rate that was valid on the day the work was logged.

Budgets

Open the MarginRadar page of a project and choose Settings. Setting up a budget takes a couple of minutes:

• Budget type: money, hours, or money and hours together.
• Period: start and end date of the budget.
• Warning and critical thresholds: default 80% and 100% (see Alerts).
• Revenue model: billable rates (hours × billable rate), a fixed price Advanced, or cost only for work without revenue such as internal projects.
• Client: an optional client label that you manage under Clients.

You can also copy the budget set-up from another project. The project page shows budget, spent, remaining, % used, burn rate and margin. With Advanced you also get:

• A forecast. MarginRadar takes the cost of the last 14 days, divides it by 14 to get a daily burn rate, and adds that burn for every day left until the budget end date to what is already spent. The result is shown as Estimate at completion, so you can compare it with the budget. Without an end date there is no estimate, only the burn rate.
• Epic budgets for phases, change requests and milestones. An epic is a Jira issue of the type Epic, and work logged on its child issues counts towards it.

Roles

Role-based visibility lets you share budgets safely with the whole team. There are three roles, enforced for the project page, the issue panel, the gadget, CSV export and the Rovo agent.

By default Jira site admins are Finance, project admins are PM for their project, and everyone else is a Viewer. Under Access in the admin settings you can assign a role to a person, for the whole site or for one project. An explicit assignment wins over the default. Every change to rates, budgets, access and data is recorded in the audit log.

Editions

Standard is free for up to 10 users and covers cost, revenue, margin, budgets, burn rate, in-app alerts, the project page, issue panel, CSV export, role-based visibility, audit log and in-app data deletion.

Advanced adds the 14-day forecast, epic budgets, fixed-price revenue, the Budget risk gadget, the Rovo agent, and alerts as Jira comments.

See the full comparison and prices on the overview page. Sites installed before editions existed are treated as Standard.

Alerts

• In-app status: every budget has a warning and a critical threshold (default 80% and 100%) that you can change per project. The project page, issue panel and gadget show where the budget stands.
• Jira comments: when a budget crosses a threshold, MarginRadar can post a comment, for example "Epic budget exceeded: 104% used". For a project budget the comment goes on the alert work item that you choose in the budget settings, and nothing is posted if you choose none. For an epic budget it goes on the epic. Advanced

Alert comments are the only thing MarginRadar writes to Jira. It never edits issues, fields or worklogs.

CSV export

Choose Export on the project page to download cost and billable data as CSV for finance and month-end close. Each row is a worklog with issue, user (Atlassian account ID), date, hours, cost and billable value.

Finance can export everything. PMs can export too, but the user and cost columns are left empty. Viewers cannot export.

Rovo agent Advanced

The MarginRadar agent works in Rovo chat. Ask it, for example, "Which projects will overrun their budget?" or "What does epic WEB-12 cost?". Available actions:

• Epic cost
• Project budget status
• Budget overruns
• Project margin

Requirements: Rovo must be available on your Jira site. Answers use live MarginRadar data inside Forge, and respect the person's role. The same actions are also offered to MCP clients through Rovo MCP, if your organisation allows that.

MarginRadar does not call any external AI or LLM service. The agent runs inside Atlassian Rovo, which processes requests under Atlassian's terms and AI trust policies. If you connect an MCP client, the answers of these actions are returned to that client under your own Atlassian authorisation.

Data deletion

Under Data controls in the admin settings, a Finance user can:

• Delete a project's data: removes that project's budget, epic budgets, worklog-derived data, project-specific rates and role assignments, and alert state. You confirm by typing the project key. The deletion is recorded in the audit log. Site-wide rates, roles and client labels stay.
• Delete all data: removes everything MarginRadar stores for the site, including rates, role assignments and the audit log. You confirm by typing DELETE ALL. Because the audit log is deleted too, no record of it remains.

Uninstall: MarginRadar's data lives in Atlassian's Forge hosted storage. After uninstall, the Forge platform soft-deletes it and destroys it at the end of the retention period in Atlassian's SOC 2 report. A reinstall within 21 days can be relinked to the old data. Radrly keeps no copy.

See the Privacy policy for details.

Data and residency

MarginRadar stores all of its data in Atlassian's Forge hosted storage (Forge SQL and Key-Value Store). It makes no calls outside Atlassian. The data follows your Jira site's data residency location.

Data stored by the app:

• Atlassian account IDs (worklog authors, people with rates or roles, the person who made an audit-log change)
• Issue keys, epic keys, project IDs and project keys
• Worklog-derived data: hours, dates, cost and billable values per issue
• Rate cards and person rate assignments, with effective dates
• Budgets, thresholds, the alert work item, client names and alert state
• Role assignments, the display currency and the exchange rate you entered
• Audit-log entries (who changed what and when, with the values before and after)

MarginRadar does not store worklog comments, issue summaries or descriptions, or people's names and email addresses. Names are read from Jira only to display them.

FAQ