• Purchasing was the one process this team ran outside Jira, and it showed: surprise invoices, duplicate tools, approvals no one could find.
• Moving requests into the JSM portal gave every purchase one place to start and an audit trail that built itself.
• Approvals route by amount and department, so a 200 dollar cable and a 40,000 dollar contract no longer take the same path.

Maria runs finance and ops at a 120-person software company. Every Monday she opened a spreadsheet, three Slack threads, and her inbox to answer one question: what did we agree to buy last week?

Her team ran everything else in Jira and JSM. Purchasing was the one process that had wandered off, and it came back as surprise invoices, two people expensing the same tool, and approvals nobody could find. Here is how a team in that spot moved buying back to where the work already happens, with Raley Procurement for Jira and JSM.

The challenge: spend with no home

The company was growing, and so was its spend: new laptops, contractor invoices, a dozen SaaS renewals a month. The data was fine. Budgets, departments, and vendors were all known. The process around them was not. No single place to raise a request, no agreed path for who signs off, no current record of what had been committed. The spreadsheet was a source of truth, just never a current one.

The old way of approving a purchase

Before Raley Procurement, one purchase took a familiar detour:

• Ask around. Ping a manager on Slack about budget, then guess who else needs to approve.
• Email the sign-off. Approval lived in a reply-all thread finance was sometimes copied on.
• Update the sheet, eventually. A row got added when someone remembered, so the tracker always ran a few days behind.
• Reconcile at month end. Finance pieced it together from invoices after the money was gone.

Every step worked alone. Together they cost Maria an afternoon of detective work every Monday.

The solution: Raley Procurement for Jira and JSM

The team installed Raley Procurement and added "Raise a purchase request" to their existing JSM portal. Requests now start where every other request does, and move through an approval workflow the team set up to match how it actually buys. Nothing left Jira, and the audit trail built itself as a request moved from raised to approved to ordered.

What the team turned on

1. Requests in the JSM portal. A form in the portal people already use, with a known product and supplier catalog. No new login.
2. Routing by rule. Each request goes to the right approver by product, budget, department, and tier, so a 200 dollar cable and a 40,000 dollar contract take different paths.
3. Multi-currency. Vendors bill in different currencies, and the app handles it without a side calculation.
4. Order tracking from the ticket. Approved requests become orders: what is ordered, what is received, what is still outstanding.
5. POs and dashboards. A formatted PDF purchase order for the supplier, plus a live dashboard of committed spend finance can export to CSV.

"A request that used to drift for two or three days across Slack and email now clears the same day, in one system, with a record attached."

The results

Within the first week, the day-to-day changed:

• One place to request and approve. People stopped asking around. They opened the portal, submitted, and the right person was notified.
• Approvals that match the amount. Small buys cleared fast; large commitments got the extra sign-off, because routing ran by rule instead of by memory.
• A current record. The dashboard moved with the requests, so finance stopped rebuilding the month from invoices.

The shift in one view:

These show the shape of the change, not measured figures from a named customer. The point holds: a request that used to drift for days now clears the same day, with a record attached.

Why keeping it inside Jira and JSM mattered

The real win was not the features. It was that finance and ops got them without running a separate procurement platform. Maria's team already trusted Jira and JSM with its work, so adding purchase orders and approvals there meant no extra tool to administer, no data to sync, and no retraining. The app is Cloud Fortified and Partner Supported, so the tool running the spend meets the same bar as the work going through it.

• Five years building procurement on Jira and JSM produced eight lessons that cost us the most to learn.
• JSM beats the alternatives, custom workflows are the whole point, and purchase data belongs in JSM Assets, not custom fields.
• The biggest mistake: handling multiple line items with sub-tasks. Get the approval order right instead.

Five years ago, a client asked us a deceptively simple question: could they run their company's purchasing through Jira? We said yes, because we knew the platform could do almost anything. We did not yet know how much "almost" was carrying in that sentence.

Since then we have built procurement on Jira and Jira Service Management for a lot of companies, and we have made most of the mistakes so you do not have to. Here are the eight lessons that cost us the most to learn, written down so they cost you nothing. We build Raley Procurement & Quotation, so this is the view from inside the workshop.

1. JSM beats the alternatives for procurement

Of the Atlassian options, we prefer Jira Service Management for procurement. Any Jira-type platform can technically run purchasing, but JSM wins on two counts.

First, the portal is simpler. Jira's flexibility comes with interface complexity, and the JSM portal hides most of it behind a clean request form that non-technical buyers can actually use.

Second, familiarity. Plenty of companies already use JSM to talk to IT and HR, so the people raising purchase requests have used the portal before. Less training, faster adoption. Jira Work Management and the others tend to stay inside IT, which makes them a harder sell to a finance or operations team.

2. Customizable workflows are the whole point

Most purchasing systems ship with a fixed workflow and a few cosmetic options. You can add or skip an auxiliary step, but the core logic belongs to the vendor. The trouble is that every company approves money differently, and "differently" is exactly what fixed workflows cannot handle.

This is where Jira earns its place. Custom workflows, transitions, and post-functions are the backbone of the platform, and you can shape them to match how your company actually buys. One example we use often:

A purchase request is created, filled in, and sent for approval. Before any of that, management adds a preliminary verification step that catches obvious errors early, so fewer requests bounce back from approvers.

That single tweak means fewer rejected requests, faster approvals, and less time wasted overall.

3. Request types map cleanly to business processes

Finance needs precise data, and getting clean data out of busy people is its own discipline. The right information has to land in the right field, which is hard when a form has conditional logic or a vague free-text box doing too much work.

The JSM portal handles this well, because you can combine multiple request types with customizable, validated forms. A few things separate request forms can do:

• Onboard a new vendor with its own fields and approval path.
• Request a change to a purchase request that is currently locked.
• Add a discount or rebate to an already-approved request.
• Request a price change in the product registry, with a lookup and a justification.

Each of these is really its own process, so it makes sense to give each its own request type. Users still pick from one place: the JSM portal.

4. Purchase request forms are harder than they look

A good purchase request form is much harder to build than people expect. Stock Jira and JSM forms are fine for the simplest buying, because they are static. Even many third-party "smart" forms fall short, because they do not know the buyer's limits, budget, or approval logic.

There are two ways through this:

1. Build a custom form with integrations that look up users, budgets, vendors, products, and departments, plus custom approval routing. A good one lets you pick departments and vendors, expose your product registry, add multiple order lines (each with its own cost center), enforce policies like legal or security review for new products, and calculate taxes and totals to assign the right approvals.
2. Use a specialized app like Raley Procurement & Quotation that does all of the above out of the box.

One thing we learned the hard way: do not try to support multiple line items through sub-tasks. JSM does not support it, and even where it works, keeping child issues in sync with parent totals and approvals is a daily headache you will come to resent.

5. Track budgets, vendors, and products in JSM Assets

A purchase request cannot stand alone. It has to connect to departments, budgets, vendors, and products, and deciding where that data lives takes some thought.

Our first instinct, like everyone's, was Jira custom fields. It does not scale. Departments cannot link to users without custom work, vendors carry too much metadata for a field, and putting thousands of products into custom-field options is a genuinely bad day for whoever uses the form.

JSM Assets is the better home. It keeps purchase-related data organized, and because it has a REST API, syncing cached data with your master data is more manageable. Two cautions from experience:

• Store the minimum you need. Adding a field to Assets is easy; maintaining it forever is not.
• Let your ERP calculate totals and aggregates, not Jira. Duplicating data is bad. Duplicating behavior is worse.

Once a purchase is executed, JSM Assets also works nicely for tracking the goods and services you received. At that point it is doing exactly what the name says.

6. External PO numbers need their own process

Every purchase order needs a unique number, and how you generate it depends on the process you are replacing.

If a company has no formal numbering yet, the simplest move is to use the Jira ticket number as the PO number. It is clean and it tracks easily downstream.

Most companies moving to Jira already have a numbering system, often from an ERP like NetSuite. There, the external number has to be assigned to the Jira ticket, which a custom PO-number field set via a Jira Automation hook handles well. It also helps to let finance overwrite that number manually on the issue screen, and to print the PO number on any PDF sent to the vendor so everyone shares one reference.

7. Build in flexibility, because mistakes are certain

No matter how good your validation is, procurement mistakes will happen. Typos, miscalculations, a number that is an order of magnitude too big. The question is not whether, it is how painful the fix is.

The worst case is a mistake discovered after a request has cleared a long approval chain and gotten the C-suite's blessing. Most companies would much rather edit the request than cancel and restart, so a finance role that can intervene on a locked request saves real executive time.

Flexibility also covers the human stuff: an approver who is off sick, a ticket that slips through the cracks. Permissions to modify a locked PO, shortcuts to approve or reject, and reminder notifications all reduce the friction. The non-negotiable is accountability: any change to a locked PO should be auditable, so you can see who changed what, and the data is preserved automatically.

8. Get the approval types in the right order

Approvals are the heart of procurement, and the order matters more than people expect. Across our customers, the common approval types are:

• New vendor
• New product or service
• Department
• Budget or project
• Program (for spend over a set threshold)
• Gross-amount approvals

Some companies use all of them, some use one or two. When several apply, the order that usually works best is: new vendor, new product, department, budget, program, then gross-amount approvals in ascending order. Gross-amount approvals climb the hierarchy until they reach a level that can sign off the total.

Notifications should follow the same order as the approvals. For gross-amount approvals especially, send them up the chain in sequence: a CFO and VP approve before the request ever reaches the CEO's inbox.

If you are weighing the move, start with 5 reasons to run your procurement on Jira or JSM, or see how the same engine powers sales quoting in JSM.

• Raley Bookman adds a "Book a meeting room" button to the Jira Service Management portal, so people book where they already raise requests.
• Each reservation links to the room asset in the JSM Assets CMDB, so capacity, location, and equipment stay attached to the booking.
• A room can hold only one reservation per time slot, so double-bookings are blocked at the source rather than discovered at 1:59 p.m.
• Facilities stopped hand-managing calendars, and the company got a clean record of how its rooms actually get used.

Three teams. One conference room. One 2 p.m. slot. Someone is about to present a quarterly review to an empty chair and a very confused cleaner.

If that sounds familiar, you already understand the problem Raley Bookman was built to solve. Here is how one team moved room booking out of their inbox and into the Jira Service Management portal, where it belonged all along.

This is an illustrative scenario, not a named customer. The headaches, however, are entirely real.

What Raley Bookman does, in one paragraph

Raley Bookman adds a "Book a meeting room" button to the Jira Service Management portal. Employees see live availability, pick a slot, and the reservation links straight to the room asset in the JSM Assets CMDB. Because a room can hold only one reservation per time slot, the double-booking problem stops at the source instead of being discovered at 1:59 p.m.

The problem: booking a room should not need a committee

Jack runs Jira at a company that, like most, asked everyone back to the office part-time. Demand for meeting rooms went up. The way people booked those rooms did not keep pace.

All the room data already lived in the JSM Assets CMDB: capacity, location, whether the projector worked this week. None of it was doing any good, because the actual booking happened like this:

• The email ask. Someone emailed the facilities team to find out if a room was free.
• The manual check. An agent cross-referenced the CMDB against a calendar by hand, like a librarian who has lost the card catalog.
• The collision. Two teams booked the same room anyway, met in the doorway, and quietly resented each other for the rest of the quarter.

Jack's manager, Toby, asked for one thing: let people book a room through the portal themselves, without facilities playing switchboard.

The fix: a booking button inside the portal

Jack installed Raley Bookman and added a "Book a meeting room" button to the JSM portal. The booking flow went from an email thread to three clicks: open the portal, see what is free, claim a slot.

No new tool to learn. No second login. The thing employees already use for IT and HR requests now books rooms too.

"The booking flow went from an email thread to three clicks: open the portal, see what is free, claim a slot."

What the team set up

Four pieces did the work:

1. Portal booking. Employees click "Book a meeting room" and see a calendar of open slots straight away.
2. Asset-linked reservations. Each booking is tied to the specific room asset in the CMDB, so details like "seats 10" or "has a projector" stay attached to the reservation.
3. A real-time room view. The "Meeting room view" shows what is occupied right now, so people stop requesting rooms that are clearly taken.
4. Conflict handling. Once a room is reserved for a slot, Bookman will not hand the same slot to anyone else.

What changed

The booking process moved from inbox to portal, and a few things followed:

• Overlaps are blocked by design. Bookman will not accept a second reservation for a room that is already taken in that slot, so the doorway standoff stops happening.
• No more availability emails. People can see what is free and claim it themselves, instead of asking and waiting.
• Lighter load on facilities. The team stopped hand-managing calendars and got their day back for work that actually needs a human.
• A clean record. Because every booking is tied to a JSM asset, the company has a complete record of how its rooms get used, which is genuinely useful when someone asks whether the third-floor room is worth keeping.

No miracle, no buzzwords. Just the booking living where the work already lives.

• A manual purchase order can cost up to $506.52 to process (APQC), once delays, errors, and chasing are counted.
• You can run the full purchasing process, request to approval to vendor PDF, inside Jira or JSM with an app like Raley Procurement & Quotation.
• Your team keeps the interface they know, finance gets live budget reporting, and approvers can act straight from email.

A manual purchase order can cost up to $506.52 to process, according to APQC research, once you count the delays, errors, and chasing. That is a remarkable amount to spend on the privilege of buying something.

Good procurement does the opposite: the right things arrive on time, approvals move, and operations run under budget. The catch is the tooling. Here are five reasons to run procurement on software your team already uses, Jira or Jira Service Management, instead of bolting on another ERP.

The short version: you can run a full purchasing process, from request to approval to vendor PDF, inside Jira or JSM with an app like Raley Procurement & Quotation. Your team keeps the interface they know, finance gets live budget reporting, and approvers can act straight from their email.

1. Your team already knows the tool

The biggest cost of new software is the learning. Jira is trusted by a large global base of organizations, including names like NASA and Tesla, per Atlassian's customer list. Your team already uses it for IT and project work, so a purchase request is just another familiar form, not a new system to dread.

Requesters submit purchase orders through the Jira or JSM interface they use every day. The learning curve is short because there is barely a curve.

2. The workflow bends to your process

Most purchasing tools make you adapt to their workflow. Jira lets the workflow adapt to you. With Raley Procurement & Quotation, almost any purchasing process is possible: products, services, inventory, supplies, raw materials, each with the steps and rules your company actually follows.

Because purchase orders follow your Jira project workflow, you customize them the same way you customize everything else in Jira.

3. Approvals fit your real approval matrix

Approval rules are where generic tools fall down. Raley Procurement & Quotation lets you approve by budget, by department, and along your specific corporate approval matrix, including separate approvals for new products or vendors.

Approvers get an email when their decision is needed, and can approve or reject each request right from that email. That improves oversight and shortens the wait, because nobody has to log in to keep a purchase moving.

4. It connects to your other systems

Procurement does not live alone, so the app comes with an API to connect to your other tools. Your systems can update products and services in the registry dynamically, which lets you track the full life cycle of inventory, requests, and orders without re-keying data between systems.

5. Finance sees spend in real time

Leaders should not have to guess at the numbers. With live reports, finance and approval managers can see current budget status from inside Jira, across departments, budgets, and suppliers. Approved requests generate a PDF purchase order, attach it to the ticket, and can send a copy to the vendor automatically.

Who does what

The app fits the roles already in your procurement process:

• Employees submit purchase requests as Jira users or JSM customers; the procurement team validates and approves them.
• Vendors receive approved POs automatically, as a generated PDF emailed to the right supplier.
• Management oversees finance and purchasing, with budgets and inventory updating dynamically.
• Admins set up, deploy, and maintain the app, including company structure, users, and permissions.

For the longer view, read 8 lessons from five years building procurement in Jira.

• Shared resources like rooms, laptops, and vehicles are easy to own and hard to share, and spreadsheets break the moment two people want the same one.
• Raley Bookman adds self-service booking to the JSM portal on top of JSM Assets, so people reserve from the Help Center they already use.
• Each reservation becomes a Jira ticket linked to the asset, so a slot can only be held once and the audit trail builds itself.

Somewhere in your company right now, a laptop is "definitely booked," a meeting room is hosting two teams who both have it in writing, and a spreadsheet called bookings_FINAL_v3.xlsx is quietly lying to everyone.

Shared resources are easy to own and hard to share. Raley Bookman fixes the sharing part by putting reservations where your team already works: the Jira Service Management portal. It adds self-service booking on top of the assets you already track in JSM Assets. People open the portal, see what is free on a timeline, pick a slot, and get a confirmation. Each reservation becomes a Jira ticket linked to the asset, so a room, a loaner laptop, or a fleet vehicle can only be held by one person at a time.

The real cost of booking by spreadsheet

Most companies still book internal resources with some mix of spreadsheets, a shared calendar, and a hopeful email to whoever "looks after" the thing. That works until two people want the same resource at the same time, which is to say it works until lunchtime. Three things go wrong, every time:

• Downtime. Two bookings collide, someone loses, and a meeting starts ten minutes late while people find another room.
• Wasted spend. Nobody can see what is actually free, so teams buy a sixth loaner laptop while five sit in a drawer.
• Annoyed people. Booking a desk should not require knowing which colleague secretly controls the calendar.

How Bookman works

Bookman sits between your JSM Assets database and the service portal. Your assets already live in JSM Assets, with their capacity, location, and details. Bookman makes those assets bookable, so people reserve them from the same Help Center they already use to raise IT and HR requests. No new tool, no second login.

What you get

Four things do the work:

1. A real-time timeline. People see availability at a glance, pick a slot, and get an automatic confirmation, all inside the portal.
2. Asset-linked reservations. Every booking ties to a specific asset in JSM Assets, so details like "seats 10" or "has a projector" stay attached to the reservation.
3. Conflict prevention by design. Once an asset is held for a slot, Bookman will not hand the same slot to anyone else. Double-bookings stop being possible rather than being discovered.
4. Booking rules you set. Define booking windows (say, 8am to 5pm) and maximum durations so one person cannot reserve the demo room for a fortnight.

Every reservation also creates a Jira ticket, which gives you a searchable record of who booked what and when. That record is genuinely useful later, when someone asks whether the third-floor room is worth keeping.

Where teams use it

Bookman handles any asset you track in JSM Assets, not only meeting rooms:

• IT: loaner laptops, test devices, VR headsets, anything that gets checked out and (eventually) returned.
• Facilities: meeting rooms, hot desks, parking spaces.
• Operations: pool vehicles and shared equipment for off-site events.

It runs on your existing Jira, so going from five rooms to five thousand devices is a matter of adding assets, not adding infrastructure. You can also read how one team used Raley Bookman to end meeting-room double-bookings.

• Jira is powerful but unfriendly to non-technical users, so requests often arrive as messy emails instead.
• Raley Intake Forms builds branded, dynamic forms that create clean Jira tickets, embeddable on any site or Confluence page, with no license needed to submit.
• Conditional fields and field mapping mean what lands in Jira is already structured, so you skip the manual cleanup.
  

Managing incoming requests in Jira should not feel like a second job. A bug report here, a marketing ask there, an HR ticket that arrives as three separate emails and a screenshot of a screenshot. The standard Jira issue screen is either too much for the person filling it in, or too little for the data you actually need back.

Data collection should be the easy part. That is why we built Raley Intake Forms for Jira: branded, dynamic forms that turn messy requests into clean, structured tickets. You build the form, embed it anywhere (your website, a Confluence page, or a portal), and the data maps straight to your project's schema. Submitters do not need a Jira license, and fields adapt to their answers, so what lands in Jira is already clean.

The problem: Jira is powerful, not friendly

Jira is excellent at project management and intimidating at first contact. Non-technical users open the default issue screen and meet a wall of fields, jargon, and a layout that feels heavy. Many just give up and send an email instead, which is how you end up back where you started.

The native Jira Issue Collector helps, but it is short on styling and the dynamic logic you need to get good data the first time.

Dynamic fields that hide what doesn't apply

Why ask for a browser version when someone is reporting a billing problem? With conditional logic, Raley Intake Forms shows or hides fields based on earlier answers. Forms stay short and relevant, which is also the quickest way to get more of them finished.

Forms that match your brand

Your brand should not stop at the edge of your website. Intake Forms gives you control over colors, fonts, and layout, so moving from your site to the form feels like one continuous experience rather than a jarring handoff to "the Jira bit."

Drop a form into Confluence

Using the dedicated Confluence macro, you can turn any Confluence page into an intake portal. It is a tidy way to centralize internal requests without sending your team off to navigate away from the documentation they are already reading.

Build it without code

You do not need a developer to build a solid form. The what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor lets you drag and drop standard and custom Jira fields, set validations, and generate an embed code in minutes.

Clean data, mapped to your fields

Intake Forms supports Jira field types as first-class citizens. Checkboxes, date pickers, dependent dropdowns: whatever the user submits maps to your project schema, so you skip the manual data entry and cleanup that usually follows a form submission.

Better together: the Raley ecosystem

If you already run Raley Email Notifications, Intake Forms is the front half of the same loop. A form creates a ticket, and a custom-styled notification keeps the reporter updated as it moves, so the person who raised the request never has to email to ask "any news?"

• Jira's built-in notifications get noisy fast: too many, too vague, or missing the one field that mattered.
• A custom solution gives you branded emails, only the fields you choose, real attachments, and localized messages.
• Consolidated digests and reminders cut the inbox flood and keep the issues that matter from slipping.

How long did you spend this week hunting for the one email with the detail you needed? The built-in notifications in Jira and JSM are fine until they are not: too many, too vague, or missing the one field that mattered. That is time you could have spent on the actual work.

A custom notification solution makes Jira's communication clearer and more deliberate. Here are five benefits you get from one, with Raley Email Notifications as the example throughout.

1. Keep customers informed

Customers often want to follow an issue that affects them, and a custom notification keeps them in the loop as it progresses.

It also fixes a small daily annoyance: attachments. Instead of sending a link that drags the customer back to a portal they will need to remember a password for, you can send the real attachment, so they never have to leave their inbox. And when your customers speak different languages, the notifications can go out in each customer's preferred language. You decide what gets sent, how, and when.

2. Brand and customize the message

When you write to a customer, you want control over what they see. A custom solution lets you share only specific fields, add your logo so the email clearly comes from you, adjust the layout, and localize the content.

Is the next step on the customer's side? A custom notification can spell out what is needed and how urgent it is. Best of all, you do not need a developer to set any of this up. A Jira or project administrator can do it.

3. Cut the flood of Jira emails

You know the feeling. The team wraps a planning meeting, and your inbox fills with one notification per change, which you open one after another like a slot machine that only pays out in admin.

Consolidating those into a single digest cuts the clutter, saves you the click-through, and leaves you with one email to read instead of twenty. If you are a manager, picture a single summary of just the changes you care about, at the granularity you choose, waiting for you on Monday morning.

4. Set reminders so nothing slips

Some issues you simply cannot afford to forget, like the ones a customer needs resolved before a delivery date. A reminder keeps you connected to those issues and makes sure they are updated before the next meeting, instead of surfacing the morning after the deadline.

5. Stay informed with scheduled digests

An issue changed, a task was created, a status moved. Scheduled digest notifications, daily or weekly, can land in your inbox or a Slack or Microsoft Teams channel, so you and the team stay current without watching every ticket. Regular, structured updates are what let you make decisions and keep work on track.

To meet this demand, we are proud to introduce Raley Bookman, the premier asset reservation solution built specifically for the Jira Service Management (JSM) ecosystem.

The Challenge: The Cost of Resource Friction

Many enterprises still rely on fragmented systems—spreadsheets, legacy calendars, or manual email chains—to manage internal assets. These decentralized methods often lead to:

• Operational Downtime: Productivity losses due to double-bookings or missing equipment.
• Underutilized Assets: Lack of visibility leads to unnecessary procurement of resources that are already available.
• Employee Frustration: Complex booking processes detract from core high-value work.

The Solution: Raley Bookman

Raley Bookman bridges the gap between your Asset Management database (JSM Assets) and your Service Desk, providing a unified, self-service portal for resource scheduling. By integrating directly into the JSM Help Center, Bookman allows your workforce to reserve what they need, exactly when they need it, within the tools they already use.

Strategic Business Benefits

1. Maximized Asset ROI

Gain a clear, real-time view of resource utilization. By centralizing all reservations within Jira, management can identify high-demand assets versus underutilized ones, enabling data-driven decisions on procurement and decommissioning.

2. Seamless Employee Experience (EX)

Employee satisfaction is tied to the quality of internal tools. Raley Bookman offers a modern, intuitive "single-window" booking interface. Employees can view real-time availability on a timeline, select their desired slots, and receive automated confirmation—all without leaving the company’s service portal.

3. Automated Governance and Conflict Prevention

Eliminate the risk of human error. Raley Bookman enforces your business rules automatically:

• Collision Prevention: Intelligent logic prevents double-bookings.
• Scheduling Compliance: Set specific booking windows (e.g., 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM) and maximum durations to ensure fair access for all team members.
• Audit Readiness: Every reservation generates a Jira ticket, creating a permanent, searchable audit trail of asset usage and history.

4. Low Overhead, High Scalability

As a cloud-native Atlassian partner solution, Raley Bookman requires minimal setup and leverages your existing Jira infrastructure. Whether you are managing five meeting rooms or five thousand IT devices, the system scales with your organization without adding technical debt.

Versatile Use Cases Across the Enterprise

• IT Operations: Streamline the checkout of loaner laptops, VR headsets, or mobile testing devices.
• Facility Management: Manage conference rooms, hot desks, or parking permit allocations.
• Corporate Services: Coordinate shared company vehicles or specialized equipment for off-site events.

Conclusion: Future-Proof Your Resource Management

Raley Bookman is more than a booking tool; it is a catalyst for operational excellence. By removing the friction from asset reservation, you empower your teams to focus on growth while ensuring your corporate resources are utilized to their fullest potential.

About four years ago, we were approached by one of our clients who wondered if it would be possible to do procurement for their company in Jira. In particular, they were looking to support purchase requisitions approvals. As experienced Jira developers, we knew the possibilities of this platform were almost endless and that it could definitely be done. We also knew Jira would be an excellent choice for an effective and efficient procurement system. However, we also knew that few things are ever as easy as they seem. 

Jira is complex and corporate procurement matrices are often demanding. Although we've now helped many businesses with implementation of their own custom procurement processes in Jira, the journey wasn't always easy. 

Since we know firsthand how challenging and frustrating it can be to implement a procurement process successfully in Jira, we wanted to share part of our experience with others in the community. We hope it will encourage others to give procurement in Jira a try. The following eight takeaways are some of the most important lessons we learned along the way. 

1. Jira Service Management Is the Best Option for Procurement 

The implementation of a new procurement process in Jira begins with what can be described as a difficult decision to make. There are several Atlassian applications from which to choose and each one has its advantages. 

Any Jira-type platform can be used to support an organization's procurement process. However, based on our experience, we found that we prefer Jira Service Management (JSM) over Jira Work Management and other options. There are several reasons for this. 

Firstly, Jira is known for being very flexible software, but with that flexibility comes with the cost of added UI complexity. The user interface of JSM is more streamlined than some other options, offering basic functionalities that are sufficient to get the job done. 

Additionally, many organizations that use JSM with service desks already have users who are familiar with the software and use it regularly to communicate with different support teams. Such users require less training on the new process, leading to a faster adoption. 

In contrast, Jira Work Management and other options continue to be mostly used by IT departments. Therefore, business team users may face a more difficult implementation of a procurement process with these platforms, due to their unfamiliarity. 

2. Jira's Support for Customizable Workflows Is the Key

Many systems for purchasing have inflexible workflows, but Jira does not have this problem. It's important to take full advantage of this great feature and get the maximum impact from your implementation. 

 When we began implementing procurement in Jira, we realized how important it can be for an application to truly support an organization's purchasing process. A typical procurement solution normally has a predefined workflow with only a few options for customization. 

Mostly these customizations are superficial and consist of adding or skipping an auxiliary step. The workflow remains tied to the overall logic of the software determined by its developers. Yet there are countless ways in which businesses run approvals, and many need more flexibility.  

This is where Jira really shines. Customized workflows, transitions and post-functions are the very backbone of Jira, and can be used to the fullest to create the perfect workflow. Here's just one example: 

Ordinarily a purchase request is created, filled in with data and sent for approvals. However, the management team introduces a preliminary verification step to improve the quality of requests and eliminate obvious mistakes that can lead to denials and create extra work. 

 With this unique customization, an organization benefits from fewer incorrect requests, faster approvals and less time spent on requests overall. The savings of time and money then benefits other aspects of the business. 

3. JSM Request Types Adapt Easily to Business Processes

Precise requests are important in finance, but it can be a challenge enforcing quality data collection from users. Not only is the right data required, it must end up in the right place on the form. This can be tricky when a form contains multiple conditionally dependent fields or description fields that are too vague. 

We have found that the JSM portal's combination of multiple request types, highly customizable forms and validatable forms is a great way to make structured requests to business support teams, including finance teams. 

Here are just a few examples of what custom request forms can be used to accomplish: 

• Introduce a new vendor with custom fields to better describe the supplier and run a unique vendor approval process.
• Request a change in data in a purchasing request that is currently locked for modification. (This is a helpful feature to have when working within stringent approval change policies.)
• Introduce a discount or rebate to an already approved purchase request. 
• Request a price change in the registry of products and services or associate a cost center with specific department(s). (A good form would allow you to look up the product and specify a new price along with the justification.)

 Since each of these examples would function as a separate business process related to procurement, it makes sense to separate them into different request types. Even so, with JSM, users will still have the ability to choose what they need from a single service window — the JSM portal. 

4. Purchase Request Forms Are Complex 

A well-designed purchase request form is more challenging to build than many think. Basic Jira and JSM forms are sufficient only for a very basic purchasing process, because they are static in nature. Even many smart forms developed by third-party vendors that feature multi-row entries and calculated fields are inadequate, because they lack the context of the users' limits, budget restrictions, approval logic and so on.  

We found there are generally two ways to approach this problem: 

1. Develop a custom purchase request form with integrations to look up users, budgets, vendors, products, departments, etc. Custom implementation of an approval logic and the routing of approval requests to the appropriate approvers will also be needed.
   
   Here’s what we found a good purchase request form should be able to do:
   
   • Allow the selection of departments and vendors. 
   • Expose your product registry for picking up products and introducing new products/services. 
   • Include several order lines per request so that, if needed, each line can be associated with a different cost center from which users can choose. 
   • Have the ability to enforce company policies, such as newly added products and services being required to undergo different verifications for legal, security or other reviews before a purchase is permitted.
   • Include a purchase order request view that's able to calculate multiple taxes/totals and assign approvals depending on the data submitted for a particular request.
     
     
2. Or for an easier alternative, use a specialized app like Raley Purchase Orders that is able to support all of the requirements outlined in 1) above right out of the box.

As a caveat to this topic, one thing we learned not to do is to attempt to implement multiple line item support for purchase requests via sub-tasks. To start, this is not supported in JSM. However, we also found it to be a huge headache managing several tickets instead of one and keeping child issues in sync with their parent issues (such as totals and approvals). 

5. Tracking Budgets, Vendors and Products the Right Way Is a Must 

Another difficulty of implementing procurement in Jira is the question of how to manage data for budgets, vendors and products. A purchase request cannot really exist on its own. It has to be connected to the appropriate departments, budgets, vendors and products. Arriving at the right solution to this question takes a bit of thought. 

Like many, our first thought was that Jira custom fields could be used to manage references to this kind of data. The necessary processes would synchronize pairs of ID-label fields for budgets, vendors and products, and the user would then be able to pick them up from their respective custom fields. 

However, we soon discovered some issues. Jira custom fields that represent departments could not be connected to particular users without custom implementation. The same applies to budgets and department associations. Vendors would have too much metadata to store in a custom field. Plus, the potential of having to put thousands of products into custom field options would be a simply horrible idea from a UX perspective. 

We discovered a much better approach is to use JSM Assets for keeping track of the above-mentioned items. While JSM Assets support is only available with a premium JSM subscription and taking this approach still requires some custom development, it does provide a solid foundation for keeping purchase request-related data better organized. Synchronization of cached data with master data should also be simpler as JSM Assets has a REST API. 

However, there can still be other pitfalls with this approach. Resist the urge to sync everything related to budgets and vendors, but stay with the minimum data you need.. Adding another field into JSM assets is simple, but requires constant maintenance. The calculation of totals and aggregates should be performed by ERP, not Jira/JSM. Because while duplication of data is not good, duplicating behavior is even worse. 

Finally, we have also had success using JSM Assets to keep track of received goods and services once the purchase request has been executed. In this scenario, JSM Assets is just what the name implies — an asset management system. 

6. External Purchase Order Numbers Require a Different Process

Every purchase order needs a unique number to identify it. While it's fairly easy to work with such numbers in Jira, a lot depends on the procurement process being implemented. A new process with internally managed numbering (aka Jira issue keys) is simple, while an established external process will require a few extra steps. 

For companies that do not already have an established process for generating, assigning or managing purchase order numbers, we found that a good practice is simply to use the Jira ticket number for the purchase order number. This keeps things simple and helps with tracking further on in the process. 

However, most companies moving their procurement to Jira will already have a formal purchase order numbering system in place. These numbers usually come from a third-party system, such as Netsuite ERP. In this scenario, the external purchase order number needs to be assigned to the internal Jira ticket representing the purchase order. We found that a custom purchase order number field that can be set using a Jira Automation hook is a good solution here.

Another good practice when dealing with purchase order numbers is to permit finance team users to assign or overwrite the value in the purchase order number field manually in the issue view screen. This tweak is easy to implement using native Jira/JSM capabilities. The purchase order number should also be included on any PDFs of the purchase order that will be sent to the vendor to have a common point of reference. 

7. Building in Flexibility Helps Minimize Common Issues 

No matter how polished the validation process, procurement process mistakes are inevitable. Miscalculations, typos and more can make even a streamlined process in Jira seem tedious. Building in an ability to update the data can help minimize delays and unneeded refusals. A dedicated role that can edit purchase requests or orders when they are locked for modifications is a must. 

One of the most frustrating scenarios is when a mistake is discovered after a purchase request has made it through a long approval process and received the final okay by C-suite executives. We have found that when a typo overestimates the amounts or description of goods or services needed, most companies prefer to have the ability to edit the request (instead of being forced to cancel the order and start over). Having a finance team member who is able to intervene in such cases speeds up the processing of requests and saves time for busy executives.  

Built-in flexibility can also minimize common issues such as a key approver falling ill or important Jira tasks being overlooked. Permissions can be granted to allow the modification of an existing purchase order as well as shortcuts for approving or rejecting it. A built-in system for reminder email notifications can minimize mistakes such as a user forgetting about a pending approval or the need to re-assign the ticket to the next link in the chain of approvals.  

The key to building in such flexibility is transparency and accountability. Modifications to an already locked purchase order should be auditable, such that it is possible to document which authorized user has made the change, view what changes were made and ensure the data is preserved automatically. 

8. The Right Approval Types in the Right Order Is Key

Approvals are central to any procurement process, but how they are handled is frequently a topic of debate. Key questions include which things must be approved and in which order they should be approved. 

Our experience has given us some insight on which best practices to follow with the approval process. While each company will have different needs, we most often see customers using the following approval types: 

• New vendor
• New product/service
• Department (such as requests originating from a specific department)
• Budget or project 
• Program (particularly when an expenditure exceeds a predefined threshold)
• Gross amount-based approvals

 Some companies use all of these approval types and others use only one or two. If multiple approval types are required, we found that the following order is normally best: 

• New vendor approval
• New product approval
• Department approval
• Budget approval
• Program approval
• Approvals based on gross amounts, in ascending order 

 Gross amount-based approvals normally need to ascend up the hierarchy of approvals to a level that meets the request's gross total. Several user profiles might be involved in approving a purchase request with the same upper limit. 

 Notifications of approval requests should usually be sent out in the same order as the requests themselves. That may mean sending out a batch of emails for each approver in the same approval-type group. However, notifications for gross amount-based approvals seem to work best following the same hierarchy as the approvals themselves. For example, only after a CFO and Vice President receive a notification and approve a request should a notification email be sent to the CEO. 

By transforming Jira Service Management (JSM) into a quoting engine, you aren't just "managing tickets"—you are accelerating your sales cycle and professionalizing your customer’s buying experience. Here is why bringing sales quotes into JSM is a high-value move for your business.

1. Accelerated Deal Velocity (Reduced TTM)

In sales, time is the enemy of the deal. Using tools like Raley Procurement and Quotation, your team can move from "Quote Request" to "Professional PDF" in minutes.

• The Business Value: By automating price calculations, taxes, and discounts within Portal, you eliminate the manual "spreadsheet-to-doc" bottleneck. Faster quotes mean higher conversion rates before the lead goes cold.

2. A Single Source of Truth for Customer Intelligence

When quoting happens in fragmented emails, your CRM and Project Management teams are flying blind. By keeping quotes in JSM, every line item, discount, and interaction is recorded on the Jira ticket.

• The Business Value: Full traceability ensures that when a quote becomes a JSM work item, the sales team has the exact context they need. No more "what did we promise them?" meetings—the data stays in your Jira ecosystem, searchable and reportable.

3. Brand Professionalism and Consistency

First impressions matter. A "home-made" quote reflects poorly on a professional service organization. With integrated quoting, you generate high-quality, branded PDF documents that include your logo, custom terms, and standardized validity periods (e.g., "Valid for 30 days") automatically pulled from Jira fields.

• The Business Value: You provide a cohesive, "big company" experience that builds trust with stakeholders and procurement departments, regardless of your actual team size.

4. Enhanced Operational Efficiency (Inventory & API Sync)

Manually checking prices is a waste of expensive sales talent. By utilizing an app that keeps a product inventory—or synchronizing with your master data via REST API—your team always quotes from an up-to-date catalog.

• The Business Value: This eliminates "pricing leakage" (selling at outdated, lower prices) and ensures that sales descriptions are always accurate, protecting your margins.

5. Seamless Communication and Visibility

Standard JSM has limitations when it comes to sending attachments to external users. By utilizing enhanced notification functionality (like Raley Email Notifications), you can send the quote PDF directly from the ticket as a canned message.

• The Business Value: * Internal Visibility: Use private comments to collaborate with Finance or Engineering on custom quotes without the customer seeing the "behind-the-scenes" negotiation.
• SLA Accountability: Use Jira’s SLA fields to track how quickly your sales team responds to quote requests. If your goal is a 4-hour turnaround, JSM will prove whether you’re hitting it.

The Bottom Line

Integrating sales quotes into JSM isn't just a technical configuration; it’s a strategy to reduce overhead, eliminate data silos, and increase win rates. By leveraging the workflow power of Jira with specialized quoting apps, you turn your service desk into a revenue-generating powerhouse.

Raley Procurement & Quotation is a tool designed to help you efficiently manage procurement at your organization through Jira or Jira Service Management. With Raley PQ, you can automate your purchase order and approval process quickly, saving your company money and time, with the software you already know and love. 

Why Jira or JSM for Procurement?

Jira and Jira Service Management are great tools to not only support your ITSM processes but also to run procurement in your organization. In fact, Jira can be a great match for procurement. 

The Jira platform is trusted by more than 100,000 organizations worldwide, including giants like NASA and Tesla. While new software can be a gamble, Jira is familiar. You already know and trust it to support your IT processes. 

Choosing to automate your procurement process with Jira is also smart and cost effective. A recent study by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) discovered that a manual purchase order process can cost as much as $506.52 per purchase order , due to delays, errors and other inefficiencies. 

Yet best of all, it's simple to take your operations to the next level and start managing your procurement process in Jira. All it takes is Raley PO app. 

Why Raley P&Q for managing your orders? 

Raley is a simple yet powerful purchasing app that lives on top of your Jira setup. It allows you to save money and time by automating your procurement process using your existing Jira software. Here's how it works: 

• Your Jira or JSM users can create a purchase order request as a Jira ticket from the convenience of the JSM portal. 
• The purchase order ticket is submitted for approval to your organization's designated purchase order approver(s). 
• The approvers are notified by email when their say is needed, improving oversight of purchases and speeding up the approval process.   
• Approvers are able to approve or reject each individual purchase order right from their email. 
• Approved requests generate a PDF file of the purchase order, attaches it to your Jira ticket and can send a copy to your designated vendor.
• Raley PO purchase orders follow your Jira project workflow, making them fully customizable to your organization's needs. 
• Your organization's finance department and approval managers can easily view the current status of your organization's procurement budgets from the convenience of Jira. 
• Powerful reporting tools let you monitor the status of your purchase orders across departments, budgets and suppliers. 

Automating your procurement process with Raley PO and Jira/JSM has many benefits. Here are just a few: 

An Easy Learning Curve

Raley P&Q is designed to be easy to use. Unlike other options that require everyone to learn a new piece of software or understand a complicated process, Raley P&Q is simple and familiar. Requesters simply submit their purchasing requests using the Jira/JSM interface they already know how to use.

A Customizable Procurement Workflow

With a super flexible procurement workflow, Raley P&Q is built to do what you need it to do. Nearly any kind of procurement process is possible. You can use Raley P&Q to purchase your organization's products, services, inventory, supplies, raw materials and more, and can customize it to suit. 

A Highly Flexible Approval System

Approvals with Raley P&Q are also extremely flexible, letting you use the process that's best for your organization and adapt the app to suit you. You can customize your approval process in terms of budgets and departments, your unique corporate approval matrix and incorporate approvals for new products or services.

A Way to Integrate Your Other Tools

Raley P&Q is designed to help you automate as much of your procurement process as possible to maximize efficiency. It comes with an API to integrate with your other tools and your systems can dynamically update products and services in our registry. This way you can track the entire life cycle of inventory, requests, orders and more. 

An Ability to Stay Up to Date

With an ability to access live reports, your leaders don't have to wonder about the organization's finances. Raley P&Q's accurate and up-to-date spending reports help make sure you're always in control of your budgets. It's a great way to ensure your organization always knows where it stands. 

How Does Raley PO Fit Into Your Team?

Raley P&Q comes with everything you need to meet the needs of your team. The app is designed to accommodate the different roles in the procurement process. 

Employee Roles

Your organization's employees will use Raley PO as Jira users or JSM customers as team members submitting purchase order requests and your in-house procurement team validating and approving the requests. 

Vendor Roles

Your vendors can receive approved purchase orders from your organization through the Raley PO app automatically. The app will generate a PDF of each approved purchase order and email it to the appropriate vendor. 

Management Roles

Your organization's leadership will have access through Raley PO to oversee finance, purchasing and carry out their other supervisory duties. Inventories and budgets are always updated dynamically in the app. 

Admin Roles

Your organization's administrative team will be able to setup, deploy and maintain Raley PO for the rest of your team. This role can perform configuration of the app, managing the company structure, users and permissions within the app. 

At RaleyApps, we believe that data collection should be a breeze—not a bottleneck. That’s why we built Raley Intake Forms for Jira.

The Problem: Jira Complexity vs. User Experience

Jira is a powerhouse for project management, but its default issue creation process can be intimidating for non-technical users. They are often met with a sea of fields, technical jargon, and a UI that feels "heavy."

On the flip side, using the native Jira Issue Collector often lacks the styling flexibility and dynamic logic needed to ensure the data you receive is actually high-quality.

The Solution: "Jira Issue Collector on Steroids"

Raley Intake Forms allows you to create beautiful, branded, and dynamic forms that can be embedded anywhere—from your corporate website to your Confluence pages. Here is how it transforms your workflow:

1. Dynamic Behavior with Dependent Fields

Why show a "Browser Version" field if the user is reporting a billing issue? With Raley Intake Forms, you can use conditional logic to show or hide fields based on previous answers. This keeps forms short, relevant, and improves completion rates.

2. Fully Customizable Styling

Your brand doesn't stop at your website’s footer. Raley Intake Forms gives you full control over the look and feel. Match your corporate colors, fonts, and layout so the transition from your site to the form feels seamless for your customers.

3. Confluence Integration Made Easy

Using our dedicated Confluence Macro, you can turn any Confluence page into a high-powered intake portal. It’s the perfect way to centralize internal requests without forcing your team to navigate away from their documentation.

4. No-Code WYSIWYG Editor

You don’t need to be a developer to build a robust form. Our intuitive "What You See Is What You Get" editor allows you to drag-and-drop standard and custom Jira fields, set validations, and generate embed codes in minutes.

5. Native Support for Standard & Custom Fields

We provide first-class support for Jira field types. Whether you’re using checkboxes, date pickers, or complex dropdowns, the data submitted via Raley Intake Forms maps perfectly to your project schema. No more manual data entry or cleanup.

Perfect Pairings: The Raley Ecosystem

If you are already using Raley Email Notifications, you’ll find that Intake Forms is the missing piece of the puzzle. Once a form is submitted and a ticket is created, you can trigger professional, custom-styled email notifications to keep the reporter updated on their ticket's progress.

Using a custom notification solution with Jira can alleviate some of the challenges faced when meeting the demands of your project. Make the most of your project communications, so they don’t turn out to be time wasters. Making communication clearer and more structured can minimize notification challenges. 

Here are five benefits you obtain from implementing a custom notification solution with Jira.

Notify Your Customers

Sometimes customers want to be kept abreast of issues that affect them. Implementing a custom notification solution can help keep them informed and aware of the progress being made with an issue. 

Attachments... Who want to go to the portal to realize that he or she doesn't remember the password anymore? Send the real attachments instead, so that your users never have to leave their inbox for communications!

Sometimes language is an issue. The implemented solution must be able to support the information in the preferred language of your customers. 

Automating notifications to customers is an efficient and effective way to manage and share information. You have complete freedom on what should be sent, how and when.

Customize the Message

When sending communications to customers, you would like to customize what they receive. You may want to share only specific fields of a notification and insert your corporate logo, so they know the origins of the email. Custom notification solutions allow for these types of configurations as well as localization capabilities and modifications to the layout.

Is there a dependency on your customers to resolve an issue? A custom notification can keep your customer informed of the importance of the issue and the urgency required to address it.

Using a custom notification solution like Raley Email Notifications can fulfill your project communication needs and help you keep informed of the issues that concern you. It can be configured to support your desired layout or which fields you would like to share internally or externally. You don’t need to be a developer to do these configurations. Everything can be done by a Jira or project administrator. 

Jira is an efficient way to track and manage project activities and resource workloads. An add-on like Raley Emails Notifications can be beneficial for your project and help keep it on track.

Reduce the Number of JIRA Emails

The team just finished their meeting reviewing and updating the open work items. Your inbox is inundated with many notifications. You start opening one right after the other to review the updates. You wonder why can’t they just be consolidated into one email. 

Or you are an IT manager. How nice would be to receive a digested summary of the changes you care about, with the granularity that you need, from all the Jira projects on Monday morning.

Sounds familiar? The number of Jira notifications received after a meeting can be overwhelming. Consolidating them reduces the number of emails hitting your inbox. The result is less clutter, saves you time from going through them and increases your productivity.

Set Reminders

Sometimes, there’re a few issues that you want to track because the customer has requested that they are resolved in time for the delivery of the project. You want to make sure that they are updated before the next meeting. Setting a reminder helps you to remain connected with the issue and stay on track of its progress.

Stay Informed

Changes or updates made to an issue? New tasks created? Send scheduled digest notifications daily or weekly to your inbox, Slack or HipChat channel. Stay informed and up-to-date with the latest information. Regular notifications will help you make decisions to keep your project on track.