Jira Daily Worklog Automation — Auto-log Time from Google Sheets to Jira Every Night

Automatically logs time to Jira every night from a Google Sheet. No manual worklog entries needed — just fill in your sheet and the workflow handles the rest at 10 PM.

Built for developers and teams who track their daily tasks in a spreadsheet and want their Jira time entries done automatically, with a clean email report.

How It Works

• Runs every night at 10 PM via a Schedule Trigger
• Reads all rows from your Google Sheet and filters rows where status = Pending and date <= today
• Loops through each pending row one at a time using splitInBatches
• Builds the Jira worklog payload — normalises time format, constructs the ISO timestamp from date + started_at
• Calls the Jira REST API (POST /rest/api/3/issue/ticket_id/worklog) with Basic Auth
• Updates the sheet row status to Completed or keeps it Pending with an error message and incremented retry_count
• After all rows are processed, reads results from static data and builds a summary
• GPT-4o-mini writes a friendly 2–3 sentence team update
• Sends a formatted HTML email report via Gmail with success count, fail count, total time logged, and the AI summary

How to Use

Step 1 — Set up your Google Sheet

Create a sheet with these exact column headers in row 1:

• ticket_id — your Jira issue key e.g. PROJ-123
• log_text — worklog comment e.g. Reviewed PR and fixed unit tests
• date — date to log against e.g. 2026-04-02
• started_at — time the work started e.g. 09:30
• log_time — time spent e.g. 1h, 30m, 1h30m
• status — set to pending for rows to be processed
• error_message — auto-filled on failure
• retry_count — auto-incremented on failure

Step 2 — Add credentials in n8n

• Google Sheets OAuth2 — connect your Google account
• Gmail OAuth2 — connect your Gmail account for email reports
• HTTP Basic Auth — your Jira email + API token (get token at id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/security/api-tokens)
• OpenAI API — for the AI summary (GPT-4o-mini)

Step 3 — Update the workflow

• Open the Read Log Sheet node and select your spreadsheet and sheet tab
• Open the Update Sheet node and do the same
• Open Jira: Add Worklog and update the Atlassian domain in the URL: https://YOUR-DOMAIN.atlassian.net/...
• Open both Gmail nodes and update the sendTo email address
• Select your HTTP Basic Auth credential in Jira: Add Worklog

Step 4 — Activate

Toggle the workflow to Active. It will run automatically every night at 10 PM.

To test immediately, open the workflow and click Test Workflow.

Requirements

• n8n (self-hosted or cloud)
• Google account with Google Sheets + Gmail
• Jira Cloud account with an API token
• OpenAI API key (free tier works for low volume)

Customising This Workflow

• Change the schedule — edit the cron expression in the trigger node. Examples are in the sticky note
• Change the Jira domain — update the URL in Jira: Add Worklog to your Atlassian subdomain
• Use Telegram instead of Gmail — replace both Gmail nodes with a Telegram node using chatId and text
• Skip the AI summary — delete the AI Summary node and wire Build Summary directly to the Gmail node; update the email template to remove $json.message.content
• Add multiple projects — the sheet supports any mix of ticket IDs from different Jira projects in the same run
• Catch missed past days — the filter already picks up rows where date < today, so any past pending rows are automatically retried on the next run