Burnup reports

Track scope growth and progress with confidence using burnup reports

Burnup reports visualize how much work has been completed over time – while also showing how scope changes affect delivery.

Burnup reports help teams understand how much work has been completed over time – while also showing how scope changes affect delivery. Unlike burndown charts, which focus on remaining work, a burnup report visualizes completed work against the total scope, making it easier to see progress even when requirements change.

With Tempo Timesheets, burnup reporting goes beyond story points. By grounding progress in actual logged time, Tempo helps teams, managers, and stakeholders see how real effort translates into delivery – across sprints, projects, and long-running initiatives.

What is a burnup report?

A burnup report is a chart that shows two key lines over time: completed work (how much work has been finished so far) and total scope (the full amount of work planned, including any changes).

As work is completed, the completed line moves upward. When scope changes – such as new work being added – the total scope line shifts accordingly. This makes burnup reports especially useful for understanding progress in environments where scope is expected to evolve.

In Jira and agile teams, burnup reports are commonly used to track delivery progress without masking scope changes, communicate progress clearly to stakeholders, and support forecasting for releases or longer-term initiatives. While burndown charts are more popular, sometimes teams would rather see how much work they have done, rather than how much they have left. Scope creep is typically clearer and easier to see in burnup charts.

The value of burnup reports

Burnup reports provide clarity where traditional reports fall short. They help teams maintain transparency when scope changes. Instead of hiding scope creep, burnup reports make it visible – so teams can respond early.

Stakeholders can see what's been completed and how scope has evolved over time. By understanding how quickly completed work grows relative to scope, teams can better predict delivery timelines. When work is added mid-stream, burnup reports avoid the confusion that can arise in burndown charts.

Burnup reporting with Tempo Timesheets

Tempo brings a time-based perspective to burnup reporting by combining Jira issue data with accurate worklog data from Tempo Timesheets.

With Tempo, burnup reporting can reflect actual logged hours instead of estimates alone, progress across multiple teams or projects, and real effort invested over time, not just task completion.

Because Tempo captures when and where time is logged, burnup reports can be built to show how completed effort accumulates against planned or total scope – giving a more reliable view of delivery.

What makes Tempo's burnup reporting different

  • Time-based progress, not just story points

Most burnup reports focus on issues or story points. Tempo adds depth by enabling burnup views based on actual time logged, helping teams understand how effort translates into outcomes.

  • Flexible scope across Jira

With Tempo's reporting and integrations, burnup reports can span multiple Jira projects, epics or initiatives, and teams, roles, or accounts. This makes burnup reporting useful not only for sprints, but also for cross-team initiatives and long-running work.

  • Works seamlessly inside Jira

Tempo Timesheets is built for the Atlassian ecosystem. Teams can log time, manage work, and analyze progress without leaving Jira – reducing friction and improving data quality.

  • Powerful reporting and visualization options

By combining Timesheets with tools like or , teams can create burnup visualizations that reflect complex scopes, evolving work, and real delivery patterns.

Create burnup reports with Custom Charts

If you're looking to stay on top of project progress and avoid scope creep, a burnup report is an excellent tool. With the help of Custom Charts for Jira and , you can make highly customizable burnup reports on a Jira dashboard or Confluence page.

Standard Jira burnup charts

There is a burnup chart available out of the box in Jira. However, it is a project report, not a dashboard gadget. That means you cannot add the report to a Jira dashboard. Nor can you customize it.

The standard Jira burnup chart can only report on a single sprint. You can't see progress on an epic or release. You also can't see progress on more than one sprint. This is a problem if you're a big enterprise with multiple agile teams and you want to see progress over time across all their work.

Build flexible burnup reports with Custom Charts

Custom Charts lets you build flexible issue history reports on your Jira dashboards and Confluence pages.

With Custom Charts, you can build burnups of individual or multiple sprints, epics, releases, teams, and projects. This makes them useful both for individual agile teams and Scrum Masters/product owners, and program managers who want a bird's eye view of whether all their teams are on schedule to deliver.

With an extensive range of customization options, you can make burnups that look exactly how you want them to, tailoring them to meet the specific needs of your team and stakeholders.

You can create burnups and all kinds of other charts by adding the Custom Charts gadget to your Jira dashboard, or by adding the Custom Charts macro to your Confluence page. To create a burnup or burndown, choose a 2D chart and select "Issue History" from the Chart By dropdown, and "Status" from the Group By dropdown.

Create time-based burnup reports with Timesheets

If you use Timesheets to log and track time on your customer accounts, then you can create a burnup that shows the progress of hours worked on an account.

For this you'll need the Account Custom Budget Burnup Gadget, which you can add to your Jira dashboard. You can insert a custom budget (using the Insert goal field) and period. The gadget provides flexibility in how data is visualized and helps managers and executives to monitor progress on accounts, and to plan and allocate resources accordingly.

Accurate and consistent time tracking is key to an effective Timesheets burnup report. Encourage your team to regularly log time in Timesheets to ensure your data is reliable.

When new work is added, the total scope line adjusts – clearly showing scope growth. Managers review progress trends to assess delivery risk and capacity. Stakeholders use the report to understand progress without misreading scope changes.

Best practices for burnup reporting

Log time consistently to ensure burnup data reflects real effort. Review scope changes regularly to understand their impact on delivery. Use burnup alongside burndown for a balanced view of progress and remaining work.

Filter reports by team or project to uncover where effort is concentrated. Use historical burnup data to improve future planning and forecasting.

Get more from your agile reporting

Tempo Timesheets turns burnup reports into a reliable source of truth by grounding progress in real work performed. By combining time tracking, flexible reporting, and deep Jira integration, Tempo helps teams move beyond surface-level metrics and gain confidence in how progress, scope, and effort align.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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Use a burnup chart when your project scope is likely to change during execution or when you need to communicate progress to stakeholders who need visibility into scope growth.

Burnup charts excel in environments where requirements evolve, new features are added mid-project, or scope creep is a concern. They show both completed work and total scope as separate lines, making scope changes immediately visible. This prevents the misleading picture that can occur with burndown charts, where adding new work can make a team appear to be falling behind even when they're completing tasks on schedule.

Burndown charts work better for fixed-scope sprints where the focus is on completing a predetermined set of work. For long-running initiatives, product development, or projects with external dependencies that might introduce new requirements, burnup charts provide clearer communication and reduce misunderstandings about progress versus scope changes.

Burnup velocity measures how quickly your team completes work over time, helping predict future delivery timelines. Calculate it by measuring the amount of work completed in a given time period – typically a sprint or week.

For story point-based burnup charts, velocity is the number of story points completed per sprint. For time-based burnup reporting in Timesheets, velocity represents the hours of work logged and completed per time period. To establish a reliable velocity baseline, average the completed work across multiple recent periods (typically 3-5 sprints). This smooths out anomalies from holidays, team changes, or unusual circumstances. Once you have average velocity, you can forecast completion by dividing remaining scope by velocity.

For example, if your team completes 80 hours per week and has 240 hours of scope remaining, you can forecast approximately three weeks to completion – assuming scope remains stable.

Yes, burnup charts work well for Kanban teams, though the approach differs slightly from sprint-based agile. In Kanban, burnup charts typically track cumulative flow of completed work items over time rather than against sprint boundaries.

Since Kanban focuses on continuous delivery rather than time-boxed iterations, the burnup chart becomes a tool for visualizing throughput trends and delivery predictability. The total scope line might represent a release target, quarterly goal, or rolling forecast rather than a fixed sprint commitment.

Tempo Timesheets supports Kanban workflows by tracking time logged across continuous work streams, allowing teams to build burnup views based on actual effort invested. This helps Kanban teams demonstrate progress, identify when work-in-progress limits are being respected, and forecast completion dates for larger initiatives even without formal sprint structures. The key is maintaining consistent work item sizing or using time-based metrics rather than story points.

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