Board reports: estimate vs. actual

You only know whether an estimate was any good once you hold it against the logged time. That is exactly what every board's Reports tab is for: logged hours per person, estimate vs. actual per card and a chronological time log — scoped to any date range and any board filter. The tab belongs to the Business Pro plan.

What you need

• The Business Pro plan — see pricing.
• The boards.viewReports permission — admins and project leads have it by default, other team members need to be granted it.
• Cards with estimates and logged time — the report only shows cards that actually had time logged in the chosen period.

1. Open the Reports tab

The “Reports” tab sits right on the board, next to the other views. It has three parts: the tiles total logged, total estimate and remaining at the top, the breakdowns below, and at the bottom the time log with every single entry and its comment, newest first. If more time has been logged than estimated, the third tile turns amber and shows how far over you are — the first signal, before you have looked at a single card.

2. Pick a date range

“From” and “To” scope the report to a period — filtering on when each time entry was started. For the question “are we systematically estimating too low?”, the last month or the last sprint is the right slice: big enough for a pattern, small enough that old projects don't blur the picture.

3. Read hours per person

Logged time per team member is shown as bars. A toggle switches the bars to relative scale — the longest bar becomes 100% — so differences stay visible even when the totals are small. One row may be called “Unattributed”: imported entries that carry no person — Toggl, for instance, sends no email address. They still count towards the total, which is why they get their own row instead of vanishing as a silent gap between the total and the breakdown.

4. Estimate vs. actual per card

The card list is sorted by logged time — the most expensive cards come first. Each row shows estimate and actual side by side; cards without an estimate are marked as such. When reading it, the pattern matters, not the single case: one card running over is everyday life. But if month after month the same kind of card runs over — always the bugs, always the same epic — you are estimating systematically low, usually by a surprisingly constant factor. That honest number is also what makes your capacity planning reliable later.

5. Let the board filter follow

The most useful and least obvious detail: the report follows your board filter. Filter the board to an epic, a person, a card type, a column or a priority, and the tiles, the person list and the card list compute over that subset only. “How well do we estimate bugs?” or “How much time went into this epic?” becomes a filter, not an export.

6. Pull the numbers out

The report itself shows hours, not money. For your own pricing or the records, export the board as Excel or CSV — “Estimate” and “Logged” are per-card columns in the export, and the file can later be imported back as a board.

Troubleshooting

• The tab is missing or says “no access”. You lack boards.viewReports — or the workspace is below Business Pro.
• The report is empty. No time was logged in the chosen period. The report only shows cards with logged time — widen the range, or track time first.
• The total estimate looks too small. It deliberately sums only over the cards that received time in the period — otherwise “remaining” would count work that was never started.
• The time log seems incomplete. It shows the latest 200 entries. Narrow the date range and everything fits.

Next steps

• Plan sprint capacity — turn realistic estimates into realistic sprints.
• Close a sprint and read the burndown — the same question from the sprint's perspective.
• Pricing — time tracking and reports belong to Business Pro.