9 Problems with Using Jira for Spend Management

An issue-tracking software product developed by Atlassian, Jira is a useful tool for bug tracking and project management. Its many integrations, user-friendly interface, and flexibility allow teams to improve their workflow efficiency.

However, because of its ticketing capabilities, some teams have started using Jira for functions outside of issue tracking. One such area is spend management. While Jira may have some of the capabilities necessary to do the job (albeit crudely), it falls short on the critical functionality a modern finance team needs to manage spend. Here’s why:

Requests can be tracked as they come in, but once a request is approved or denied, that’s the end of it. What actually happens with the money is unknown, or at least is not linked in any way to the original request. Without this connection, finance is left with a series of disparate requests and transactions and has to guess to put them together. Have you ever tried to upload your credit card statement to Jira? Yeah…neither have we.

Through Jira’s software, employees can only send requests to a central destination. If the request needs to go somewhere else, it must be manually re-routed. This forces an individual or team to serve as a “router” and potential bottleneck for all purchase requests. In some cases this may be insufficient to fully enforce a purchasing policy. In others, it can be too heavy-handed for more trivial transactions.

If a request is approved, employees get a card with no enforceable spending limit-basically a blank check. There’s nothing stopping employees from spending more money than originally requested, and no way to gain visibility into the delta until you get your card statement at the end of the month and cross-reference

Jira, and other home-grown spend management tools like Google forms, aren’t enforceable. Such platforms give the appearance of a formal process, but lack the actual controls necessary for a…

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