Connecting with Asana

If you use Asana as a project management tool, you can easily integrate it with Everhour and start tracking time for all your Asana tasks. No more tab switching.

How to setup

1

You'll be prompted to connect during signup. To do this, you need to hit 'Asana' button and let Everhour do the rest, step-by-step.

2

You can connect Asana or any other platform at any time from the Integrations page in your account settings.

3

You need to invite your team to join Everhour. During the registration process, they will need to connect their Asana accounts and install our browser extension. I.e. only those you invite into Everhour will be able to track time and see time progress. These are not necessarily all Asana users. Same way your clients will not see anything in Asana unless you add them to your Everhour team.

Tip: Click on the extension icon in Chrome, and then on the pin icon next to Everhour to make it visible all the time.

How sync works

• When you connect Asana, Everhour will automatically sync all your projects across all teams and workspaces,  except your personal projects. Personal Projects won’t be synchronised by Everhour and time cannot be tracked for these projects. It's currently not possible to make a granular sync, deciding what projects you wish to connect and what not, but we are working on this feature. 
• Sync happens periodically and automatically so all new projects that you create in Asana will be added to your Everhour account after some time. You can manually resync them at any time. Everhour also automatically updates the names of tasks or projects if they were renamed in Asana. This way Everhour reports will always show the freshest data.
• Any admin in Everhour will see any project from Asana as soon as it has time reported or budget configured in Everhour. This is important in order to make sure that all Everhour admins see the same metrics in reports. But even if that is the case, an admin, who does not have access to the project in Asana and still see the project in Everhour due to mentioned premises, will see just very limited information. There are project title, a task title, who tracked time and that's basically it. We do not sync attachments, comments, or task description from Asana in any case. Regular employees will only see projects and tasks that they has access to in Asana. If access to the project is denied or changed in Asana, it will also happen on Everhour side.
• An additional perk of our integration is to sync custom fields. Read on how to sync a task estimate with a custom field from Asana.

How to trigger instant sync:

1

If you just added a new project in Asana or renamed the existing one and want to see these changes immediately in Everhour, you need to re-sync projects from the Integrations page manually.

2

Same with tasks. If you've just renamed a task, added a new tag or moved the task into a different section and you want to see these changes instantly, you need to go to the Projects page, select the project(-s) with a change and hit 'Resync Tasks'.

Controls inside Asana

After successful integration, Everhour supplements Asana interface with a number of features.

1. Side bar: use our 'Timesheet' button to open timesheet window. You’ll be able to quickly look at all your timekeeping for a Day or Week as well as quickly add time and comments for the tasks you have been working on.
2. Header: configure any project as billable, set up project budget, see total project hours and estimate. By default, only admins can see the budget. You can enable showing budget to everyone. Regular members don't see anything money-related in Everhour;
3. '$' icon: Everhour lets you mark certain tasks inside the billable project as non-billable and thus exclude these tasks time from the billable amount calculation or set them with a custom rate;
4. Task time: total time reported by each employee and estimate into the task. Click on the badge to make changes. Read on how to sync a task estimate with a custom field from Asana;
5. Buttons: you can track time using the timer or log time manually.
6. Subtasks: you can track time and watch progress by any subtask.

More places:

• Time on Home: you'll see estimate and reported time on Asana's Home page;
• Time on Portfolios: you'll see estimate and reported time on Asana's Portfolio page;
• Time on Timeline: you'll see estimate and reported time on Asana's Timeline page;
• Create Asana project: you can assign a client from Everhour when you create a project inside Asana;
• Duplicate Asana project: you can choose to copy task estimates and project budget when making a project duplicate in Asana.

Making reports with Asana data

There are a number of columns that shows specific data coming from Asana. Open a report builder and select any of columns to display the data in your report.

• Project and task accordingly show the names of Asana projects and tasks; 
• Parent task column that can group your subtasks under the parent name; 
• Section shows the name of the Asana section/list name;
• Task number and Task status shows the task ID and whether it is open/closed;
• Tag shows the name of Asana tags;
• Any custom field can be used as a separate column;

Permissions

In general, we rely on Asana's permissions a lot. If in Asana the user has access to the task project, therefore, he can track the time in it. If you take away someone's access to the project in Asana, this user will no longer be able to track time into its tasks. Past history will remain in the reports of the team, but the user will lose it.

Configuring budgets, marking a task as non-billable, assigning a client to the project can only be done by admins. The admin in Everhour can see projects and tasks of all members (except the so-called 'Personal Projects'). It does not matter if an admin has access to the same project in Asana. This is due to the fact that any admin should see the same totals in time reports and be able to configure projects billing and budgeting.

Regular users cannot track time into the archived project. Admins can do that, but only manually (timer is disabled). Thus, we indicate that the project is archived and make sure that no one tracks time accidentally.

Troubleshooting

It may happen that Asana changes something in their code and these changes break some part of our functionality. We always do our best to apply the necessary corrections ASAP, but this requires updating our browser extension (this is how we embed into Asana interface and there is no other mechanism). If you encounter an issue that something has stopped working, please make sure that you have the latest version of the extension installed. Read this article for more details.

If suddenly the review of our extension is delayed by Google team, as a temporarily workaround, you can install the dev version of our extension. Read this article for more details.

Disconnecting

To disable integration, go to 'Integrations' page in Everhour account. 

This option affects only your account, other team members are still able to track time. If the whole team disconnects Asana, no one can track new time in Asana, time history remains only in admin reports. 

To remove all Everhour controls from Asana interface, delete our browser extension.