Log Jira worklogs nightly from Google Sheets with Gmail and GPT-4o-mini

Description

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 | log_text | date | started_at | log_time | status | error_message | retry_count |
|-----------|----------|------|------------|----------|--------|---------------|-------------|

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