Connecting with Notion

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

How to setup

1

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

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

2

You need to invite your team to join Everhour. During the registration process, they will need to connect their Notion 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 Notion users. Same way your clients will not see anything in Notion unless you add them to your Everhour team.

3

You will need to grant access to our extension after it is installed. Click on its icon in the toolbar > Grant Access. Otherwise we won't be able to embed time tracking controls inside Notion interface.

4

Click on the Extensions icon in Chrome, and then on the pin icon next to Everhour to make it visible all the time. This way you can always be aware if your timer is running or not (optional step).

How sync works

Upon integrating with Notion, you will be prompted to choose the specific pages you wish to grant Everhour access to. Only the selected pages will be involved in the subsequent configuration process.

Once you have chosen the pages, you will be guided to select how Everhour should interact with your Notion. This involves defining what should be recognized as a " Project" and what should be categorized as a "Task" within Everhour.

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First option (standalone project, by default): This is particularly handy when you have multiple distinct pages, with each page representing a project. The database within each page contains the tasks associated with that specific project.

2

Second option (relation): This option follows the default pattern suggested by Notion's templates. You maintain a separate database for projects and another separate database for tasks. Tasks are linked to projects through a relation property. Everhour will interpret and recognize this relation, ensuring accurate attribution of your entities.

3

Third option (don't sync): This option allows you to deactivate a database if you choose not to synchronize it with Everhour.

If you want to retrospectively connect other projects/pages to Everhour, you should add them individually. Open a project you want to sync > Click "..." > Add Connections > Choose "Everhour". After that, go to Everhour Integrations page and click "Resync projects". Finally, refresh your Notion page to see Everhour controls. 

Everhour automatically updates the names of connected tasks and projects if they were renamed in Notion after some time. This way Everhour reports always show the freshest data.

How to trigger instant sync

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

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Here is how to do it for projects.

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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 Notion

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

1. Header: See total project hours and estimate (click on it to open a project summary);
2. Task: See timer, estimate, and reported time next to the task title, as well as by section;
3. Buttons: Track time using the timer or log time manually;
4. 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.

Making reports with Notion data

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

• Project and task accordingly show the names of Notion projects and tasks; 
• Task number and Task status shows the task ID and whether it is open/closed.

Permissions

In general, we rely on Notion's permissions a lot. If in Notion 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 Notion, 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. It does not matter if an admin has access to the same project in Notion. 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 Notion 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 Notion 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 Notion, no one can track new time in Notion, time history remains only in admin reports. 

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