Custom Field values summary on Timeline

When you plan your backlog and define planned dates for the future work you may be interested in building a timeline-based report for your backlog. Timeline calculation feature makes such reporting possible. It is possible to build a report showing totals based on numeric custom field values, distributed on a timeline with daily, weekly, monthly or less precise resolution according to the planned dates of the entities.

We'll now create a Visual Report for the future time period that will display monthly totals of two custom field values for Epics.

Creation of the dataset

• Setup two numeric custom fields for Epics. Let them have names "Dev Resources" and "QA Resources".
• Create two epics, E1 and E2. Fill in planned start dates, planned end dates, and values of the two custom fields in each epic.

• [Optional] Set up list view or roadmap view for Epics. Customize cards so that the values of the custom fields can be observed.

Configuration of the Report

• Click +Create > Report to start building new Visual report.

• Create report from Blank template.

• We recommend to use the following Sources settings as initial ones:
  • Source type: Entity Reports
  • Projects and teams: the ones you're interested in
  • Entities: Epics

• Click on Horizontal axis in order to add Calculation for it. Use the following formula:

  TIMELINE([Planned Start Date],[Planned End Date])

• Set up proper grouping for resolution of dates. Say in this use case we'll report totals monthly:

• In the vertical axis, define fields across which totals should be calculated. The following options are supported:
  • Count of entities
  • SUM(Effort)
  • SUM(Numeric Custom Field Name)

  In our use case we'll use the following two calculations:

  SUM(Dev Resources)
  SUM(QA Resources)

  We display values for two different custom fields in the same chart. In order to split areas we switch chart type to Stacked Bar chart.

• Almost done! Give unique name to your report and press Finish setup button.

Here is how the created chart looks like:

Further customization

Using ID or Name field as the Color option we can show each work item in the same stacked bar chart:

Learn More

In order to ensure that a report displays all your data properly please learn more about our recommendations, best usage practices and known issues related to reports of this kind. More information: Visual Reports with Timeline data aggregation