Project Management to Time Tracking Sync
Automatically create and configure time tracking projects whenever a new project appears in your PM tool. Every billable hour gets captured from minute one, with the correct client, billing rate, and task structure already in place.
The Hours You Never Invoice
Your team finished the Henderson rebrand last month. Forty two hours of strategy, design, and revisions. But when the invoice went out, it only showed 36 hours. Six hours vanished. At $150 an hour, that's $900 you did the work for and will never collect.
This isn't unusual. Professional services firms without integrated time tracking lose 10 to 15 per cent of their billable hours. For a ten person team billing at $150 an hour, that's more than $150,000 a year in revenue that simply disappears.
The root cause is painfully simple. Someone creates a project in Asana (or Monday.com, or ClickUp), and nobody sets up the matching project in Harvest or Toggl. Maybe they forget. Maybe they planned to do it later. Maybe they didn't know the billing rate yet. Whatever the reason, your team starts working before the time tracker is ready, and those early hours are gone.
Manual project setup in a time tracking tool takes 5 to 15 minutes. You need the client name, the billing rate, the task structure, the team members. Multiply that across 20 or 30 active projects and you've got a full time admin task that nobody wants to own. So it slips. And every slip costs you money.
How It Works
The automation connects your project management tool to your time tracker, so creating a project in one instantly configures the other. Here's the sequence.
1. New project detected in your PM tool
When you create a project in Asana, Monday.com, or ClickUp, the automation fires immediately. It captures the project name, client details, assigned team members, and any custom fields you've set up (such as project type or department).
2. Client record verified or created
The automation checks your time tracking tool for an existing client record. If the client already exists in Harvest or Toggl, it links to them. If they're new, it creates the client record automatically. This prevents duplicate entries and ensures billing is attributed correctly from the start.
3. Billing rate looked up
Using a reference table (such as a Google Sheet or Airtable base), the automation pulls the correct billing rate for the project type and client. Development work might bill at $175 an hour, meetings at $150, and admin at a flat project rate. Each task category gets its own rate.
4. Time tracking project created with full configuration
A new project appears in your time tracker within seconds. It has the right client name, the correct billing rates, a matching task structure, and all assigned team members already added. Ready for tracking immediately.
5. Ongoing task sync
As new tasks are added or team members are reassigned in your PM tool, the time tracker updates to match. No manual maintenance needed. When someone joins the project on Wednesday, they can start tracking time on Wednesday.
6. Budget alerts and completion triggers
When tracked time hits 80 per cent of the project budget, the project manager gets a Slack notification. And when a task is marked complete in the PM tool, the corresponding time entries are flagged for review and invoicing.
Why the Native Integration Falls Short
Harvest already has an Asana integration. Toggl has a browser extension that works inside Asana. So why bother with automation?
Because those integrations solve a different problem. They let your team start and stop a timer from within Asana. Useful, yes. But they don't create the Harvest project when the Asana project is created. They don't configure the billing rate. They don't set up the task structure or add team members.
Your designer opens the new project in Asana on Monday morning, clicks the Harvest timer, and gets a blank dropdown. The project doesn't exist in Harvest yet. She shrugs, starts working, and plans to log the time later. She won't.
The Asana community forum is full of teams asking for deeper integration between their PM tool and time tracker. They want the project to simply exist in both places, configured correctly, from the moment it's created. That's exactly what this automation delivers.
What This Looks Like on a Busy Week
Picture a marketing agency with 15 staff and 25 active client projects. On a typical Monday, three new projects land. A brand refresh for a retail client, a paid media campaign for a SaaS company, and a content strategy engagement for an accounting firm.
Without automation, the operations manager needs to create three new projects in Harvest. She checks the client records, looks up billing rates, builds out the task structure, and adds the right team members. That's 30 to 45 minutes of admin before anyone can track a single hour. And if she's in a meeting until 11am, the creative team has already been working untracked for two hours.
With automation, all three Harvest projects exist before the operations manager finishes her coffee. Correct clients. Correct rates. Correct structure. The creative director starts the timer on the brand refresh at 9:03am, and it logs perfectly against the right project at $175 an hour.
By Friday, the agency has captured every billable minute across all three projects. No chasing. No reconciliation. No awkward conversations about reconstructing timesheets from memory.
The Business Impact
Let's do the maths for a ten person professional services team billing at an average of $150 an hour.
If each person loses just 30 minutes a week to untracked time (a conservative number), that's 5 hours per week across the team. At $150 an hour, that's $750 a week in unbilled revenue. Over 48 working weeks, you're looking at $36,000 a year. And that's the conservative estimate. Most firms lose far more than 30 minutes per person.
Now factor in the admin time saved. If someone spends 15 minutes setting up each new project in the time tracker, and you create 10 new projects a week, that's 2.5 hours of admin work eliminated every week. At an internal cost of $60 an hour, that's another $7,200 a year.
Total annual recovery: north of $43,000. The automation typically costs a few hundred dollars to build and under $50 a month to run. You recoup the investment in the first week.
- Every project trackable from minute one with correct billing rates
- 15 minutes of manual setup per project eliminated entirely
- 10 to 15 per cent reduction in unbilled hours across the team
- Budget overruns caught at 80 per cent, not 120 per cent
- Team members automatically added to time tracking when assigned in PM tool
- Timesheet accuracy improves without adding any friction for your staff
Frequently Asked Questions
Which project management and time tracking tools does this work with?
The most common pairings are Asana with Harvest and Asana with Toggl Track, but the same logic applies to Monday.com, ClickUp, Jira, or any PM tool with an API. On the time tracking side, Harvest, Toggl Track, TMetric, and Clockify all support automated project creation through their APIs.
What happens if our billing rates vary by client or project type?
The automation uses a rate lookup table (typically a Google Sheet or Airtable base that your finance team already maintains). When a project is created, it checks the client and project type against this table and applies the correct rate. You can have as many rate variations as you need.
Will this create duplicate projects if we rename or move things in our PM tool?
No. The automation uses unique project identifiers, not names, to match records between systems. You can rename a project in Asana and the Harvest project stays correctly linked. If a project already exists in the time tracker, the automation updates it rather than creating a duplicate.
Our team already tracks time using the Harvest timer in Asana. Do we really need this?
The in app timer is great for logging hours, but it doesn't solve the setup problem. If the Harvest project doesn't exist yet (with the right client, rate, and task structure), your team can't track against it. This automation ensures the project is always ready before anyone needs it.
Can this handle different billing rates for different team members?
Yes. When team members are synced to the time tracking project, the automation can apply member specific rates from your rate table. A senior consultant might bill at $200 an hour while a junior analyst bills at $100, and each person's tracked time reflects their correct rate.
What about projects that shouldn't be tracked or are internal?
You can set filtering rules based on project tags, categories, or naming conventions. Internal projects tagged as "nonbillable" can either be excluded entirely or created in the time tracker with a zero billing rate for capacity planning purposes.
How long does this take to set up?
Most implementations are live within a week. The automation itself takes a day or two to build and test, and the rest is mapping your billing rates and project structures. Once it's running, it needs almost no maintenance. If you'd like to see how this would work with your specific tools and billing setup, book your free audit and we'll walk through it together.
Sources
Automations we’ve already built
Thirty days after onboarding begins, an automated workflow surveys your client, pulls milestone data from your project tools, generates an AI written retrospective, and flags anyone who needs a recovery call. Every onboarding teaches the next one.
When a new client lands in your practice management software, this automation generates a tailored engagement letter with the right services, fees, and deadlines, sends it for electronic signature, then builds the client folder and kicks off your onboarding checklist. No chasing. No waiting.
A project manager fills out a short form after a discovery call. Within minutes, AI drafts a full Statement of Work into your branded template, routes it through Slack for internal approval, and sends it to the client for signature.
When a project closes in your PM tool, this automation collects every contract, deliverable, and sign off from across your systems, organises them into a standardised archive folder, and generates a summary PDF. No manual cleanup required.
When a contact is tagged in your CRM as needing an NDA, the agreement is generated from a template with their details prefilled, sent for signature, and tracked automatically. Overdue NDAs trigger reminders so nothing slips through.
Automatically converts raw meeting notes or recordings into structured, branded board minutes with tracked resolutions and action items, so your admin staff can stop spending full days on documentation that nobody reads until it's too late.
Capture scope changes on site, generate costed PDFs, route them through internal approval and client e signature, and log everything automatically. No verbal agreements, no lost paperwork, no payment disputes.
When a new contract lands in your cloud folder, an AI agent extracts the text, checks every clause against a risk framework, and sends your team a structured memo flagging the problems that actually matter. Preliminary review drops from hours to minutes.
When a new contractor lands in your HR system or Airtable base, this automation generates a complete document bundle, sends it as a single signing package through PandaDoc, and updates your records the moment everything is signed.
When a deal hits the proposal stage in your CRM, this automation pulls the client name, scope, pricing, and line items, then merges everything into a branded template. The finished PDF lands back on the deal record and in the prospect's inbox without anyone touching a document.
When every party signs a document in DocuSign or PandaDoc, this automation downloads the completed PDF, renames it to your filing convention, stores it in the right client folder, and notifies the account manager. No manual downloading, no misfiled contracts.
A scheduled workflow scans your contracts database daily, flags renewals at 30, 14, and 7 day intervals, and sends tiered alerts to account managers and leadership so nothing expires unnoticed.
When a new client is created in your CRM, this automation builds their billing profile, generates the first invoice, sets up recurring payments, and sends a secure link to collect their payment method. No manual data entry between systems, no forgotten first invoices.
When a project is marked complete in your project management tool, this automation pulls billable hours and rates, generates a branded PDF invoice, and emails it to the client with payment instructions. A copy lands in the client folder without anyone lifting a finger.
When a new patient books an appointment, this automation sends digital intake forms, collects consent and insurance details, converts everything to PDF, files it in the patient folder, and notifies your front desk. No clipboards. No data entry.
An AI agent that turns your meeting recordings into structured summaries, assigned action items, and tracked tasks across Slack, Asana, and Notion. No more post meeting admin, no more forgotten decisions.
An automated workflow pulls client KPIs from your data sources on the first business day of each month, populates branded report templates, converts them to PDF, and emails every client their personalised report before your team starts work.
Automatically classify incoming contracts by type, route each one to the right reviewer, and track every document through the review pipeline so nothing stalls in someone's inbox.
When a new B2B client submits their intake form, this automation reads every team member's role and sends each person the exact onboarding content they need. Billing contacts get payment setup. Project sponsors get the timeline. Day to day operators get tool access and kickoff details. Every stakeholder's progress is tracked independently until all are ready.
When a new client record lands in your CRM with a signed engagement letter, a prefilled contract is automatically generated and sent for e signature. No copying, no delays, no forgotten clauses.
When a prospect opens your proposal, this automation logs the view in your CRM, pings the assigned salesperson on Slack, and sends a templated follow up email if the document stays unsigned after 48 hours.
When a real estate agent fills out a short form with property details and buyer information, the automation generates a complete contract of sale, attaches the correct disclosure forms, and sends the full package to DocuSign with the right signing order.
Automatically converts approved quotes into signed service contracts with warranty terms, payment schedules, and scope definitions. No manual paperwork, no verbal agreements, no disputes three months later.
When a vendor sends a contract, AI extracts payment terms, liability caps, termination clauses and auto renewal dates into a structured row. Your procurement team can then compare every vendor agreement side by side, spotting bad deals before anyone signs.
Not ready to talk yet? Start here.
Everything we've learned building 300+ automations for small businesses, in one practical guide. Written for business owners, not engineers.
- Where your team's hours are actually disappearing
- The five automations worth setting up first and why
- How to calculate what manual work is actually costing you
- A step by step checklist to get your first automation live this week
Completely free.