Native Time Tracking read data

Community Forum English Developers & API
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Sorry for the confusion here. As @Phil_Seeman said we are behind schedule with respect to API support. We’re working with the engineering team responsible for the time tracking feature to understand what API functionality will be available when. We’ll make a post to clarify asap – thank you for your patience in the meantime.

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Hi folks, quick update here: we expect a read API for time tracking to be available by the end of January – we’ve updated the original post to reflect this.

To further clarify: as @Stefano_Tranquillini mentioned above, Estimated time works as a numeric custom field that you can read and write, with the value representing a duration in minutes. Actual time will be a new property on task objects available for reads but not writes (until later in 2023).

We’ll let you know when the API is available via the forum and update the our API documentation with the details. Apologies once again for the confusion.

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Hi, I’m also looking for a way to work with the ‘actual time’ field.

@Phil_Seeman any ideas when it will be ready?

Thanks,
Nairi

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No, I don’t know, sorry.

cc: @Kem_Ozbek @sasha_f

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@Nairi_Harutyunyan We’re planning to release functionality to read Actual time values by the end of January.

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tl;dr:

* Time tracking is now available:

  • Actual time available as Task.actual_time_minutes
  • Estimated time available as a number custom field
    • Custom.estimated_time
  • Asana-created custom fields include an asana_created_field identifier

Hey folks,

It is now possible to read time tracking information for tasks in the API! Additionally, we have added an asana_created_field field to Custom Fields.

Schema

  • Actual time: the actually recorded amount of time it took for a task to be completed.
    • available as the actual_time_minutes on the full Task resource.
    • this is a read-only sum of all time tracking events for this task
  • Estimated time: the time that was estimated by a user for the completion of a task.
    • available as a number custom field in the following endpoints:
      • GET /custom_fields/{custom_field_gid}
      • GET /workspaces/{workspace_gid}/custom_fields
      • GET /projects/{project_gid}/custom_field_settings
      • GET /portfolios/{portfolio_gid}/custom_field_settings
      • GET /projects/{project_gid}
      • GET /tasks/{task_gid}
    • Estimated time fields will include asana_created_field: estimated_time
  • Asana-created custom field: special custom fields available in the Custom Field Library that are made by Asana and feature the Asana logo badge.
    • when a custom field has the asana_created_field field set to a non-null string, it means this field appears as an Asana-created custom field in the Custom Field Library
    • you can modify the values in these custom fields
    • you cannot add a field with asana_created_field set
    • you cannot delete one with asana_created_field set

You may notice that it is possible to modify the estimated time values with this schema, but not the actual time values. For the moment, while it is possible to modify the estimated time values, we have not locked down the specification for how that affects Time Tracking. In other words, you may update the estimated time values at your own risk.

That said, we’d love to hear your feedback on that functionality. Stay tuned in the future as we continue to add more API functionality for Time Tracking!

Timeline

Date Event
2022-10-21 Original time tracking non-API launch
2023-01-20 First API launch and announcement
2023-02-07 Typo correction

Yours in Developer Relations,
Sasha, on behalf of the Asana API Team

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Thanks @sasha_f . Are you planning to implement individual entries as their own API items or is there any way to get this now that I’m missing? We have multiple team members work on one task; we are a creative agency so, for example, 30 minutes from an Art Director and then 4 hours from a Designer is currently represented in the API as simply “270 minutes” total, but we bill for the hours worked by these two people at different rates so the information is only helpful to us if we can delineate.

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Hi @Ollie_Southgate,

At this point in time, only a sum of the actual time is exposed via the API. However, were are definitely interested in expanding the functionality to include all of the individual entries exactly as you described. I’ll share your use case with the team that’s working on this, and hopefully they can prioritize it!

Thanks,
Sasha

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Thank you @sasha_f - I would appreciate you letting me know here even a vague idea of timing as soon as you know, as we have avoided paying for and implementing a secondary time tracking tool in anticipation of this feature and were counting on the API read functionality supporting this by the end of January, so it’s a hot issue for us! If it’s only a couple of weeks away we can wait, but if it’s likely going to be months or more we need to find an alternative ASAP. I appreciate you looking into it for me.

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Hello.
I would like to receive reports on the current time for employees in the API. What tasks did they work on today and how much time did they spend on each task.
Now we use Everhour for this, adding this information to the API would allow us to go completely to the functionality of Asana

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Hello,

Are you planning to add the ability to implement a timer in the project rules? For example, when a specific field is changed, the timer would start at the same time, and when the field is changed to other option again, the timer would pause? Currently you can only add timers via the information textbox and you can’t edit, rename or set the just mentioned rules, which is quite limiting and the potential what can be use is in the new feature, unfortunately I can’t use yet.

Thank you

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Is there, by any chance, a roadmap when we can see when the API will expose the time records by user (or if ASANA will include some “time by user spent between dates”… or similar?). Regards

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We also would be really interested in reading the detailed data. Because we want to use it for an automatic billing system (via POPLIN).

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I think there’s a copy/paste typo above. It should be Custom.estimated_time probably, right?

Thanks,

Larry

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Yep, typo! Thanks for the correction, I’ve updated the post and included the correction in the log

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Hey @Ollie_Southgate, @Anton_Kartsev, @Diego_Fraga_C, @Matthias_Weber,

Hearing you loud and clear. I’m working with teams internally to adjust the priority of exposing finer-grained data via the API. I don’t have a timeline I can share yet, but the moment I do, I will update this thread.

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Hello,

Thanks for the useful thread. As many people, I also need to compute the cash burn base on timeline. Indeed, I need to track traversal tasks like “intern call”. The stake of time tracking according to me, it’s to identified project that will go out of the budget (in terms of human days) and daily duty that take time and cost money to the company.

With those kinds of details, we could have good discussion like doesn’t it normal that we spend more time on “intern call” this month.

BR,
Kévin TEMIN

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Hey @sasha_f . Just adding my similar interest as @Matthias_Weber , @Diego_Fraga_C, @Anton_Kartsev and @Ollie_Southgate in having access to user by user actual_time_minutes, rather than the summation. Our use case entails being able to check availability (capacity minus actuals) of resources team by team, and individual by individual. Loving the new native time tracking so far though

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A post was split to a new topic: Connect Asana timer and Harvest

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Just wanting to echo the use case for individual time entries. That would be huge!

Thanks Asana team for this great feature!!

-Craig