We’ve been trialing Avaza because of its built in time and budget/profit tracking capabilities. In other words we want to know at glimpse when we’re on budget and when we’re not, and that we’re allocating resources correctly.
Avaza is not bad but we miss the low friction environment of Asana. For instance in Avaza to check a task off as complete you have to open the task, click on the Status dropdown menu and choose “Complete”. You can’t just mark a task as complete by clicking on the check button in a list, as you can in Asana. Another one is that you can’t create a task within the time tracker on the fly; instead you have to leave the time tracker, find the project, add the task, then go back to the timer to start timing the task.
So I’m taking one last look at how we might track time and budget/profits in Asana before we make the final jump to Avaza. Do you have any suggestions?
Preferably we don’t want to rely on integrations if we can help it. One reason being that we’re then relying on two separate software packages and two separate companies. But the main reason being that Avaza would only cost us $20/mth for 5 users, whereas premium Asana (for custom fields) + Harvest would cost us $90/mth.
I’ve learnt today that while Harvest isn’t very well integrated with Asana, Everhour is. And it’s a lot more affordable. So I might trial Everhour + Asana and see how it goes.
I am alos in search for a time tracking appa that would integrate with ASANA. I am stilll in trial, I am looking at about 10 software. So far I like the most Time doctor, PayMo and Toggle, but not sure which one we will use yet. I will take a look at Avaza as well.
i think i have a solution to do budgeting
first we should sync google sheets to asana. then input budget to tasks and subtasks in whatever style we want.
The problem is i haven’t managed to 100% sync asana->google sheets tasks/subtasks (they appear but not getting updated) even through zapier.
Have anybody got a working solution?
Dear Alexis
Thanks for feedback. Could you point where inforamation about TASK sync with google, not PROJECT? Even there is stated “Turn Asana projects or TASKS into spreadsheets” i can’t find anything about TASKS live sync with google sheets.
This is a real shortcoming of ASANA’s project management capabilities: an integrated solution to manage budget and expenses, timetracking of projects. Just look at harvest and other tools and include similar functionality in ASANA please! A project not only has tasks, but only has budgets to keep track off!
Well said, we need a solution to make sure everyone on the team is aware of the budget. Usually if the budget is out of sigh it is out of mind. If it were up to me we would leave Asana altogether.
So after all the trying we stopped our choice on Time Doctor, their old application is a very well thought tool. They sync all the tasks fro asana so I can track time against, for now there is no way to automate recording of that time back to asana custom field, but its not critical for me.
And I use google calendar to block my time for specific meetings and repetitive tasks. Also use asana’s my tasks where I plan the tasks I want to focus on for the next 3 days. Planning on using asana’s time lines for more strategic work planning, I guess all this will fit my needs till something changes for better integrations or functional.
Budgets are based on billable rates of your employees and hours they report into Asana tasks. Additionally, you can track expenses and consider them in budgets too.
The project budget can be overall or recurrent (resets every week or month). You can receive an email notification when you reach a certain % of it.
Thanks Mike. We actually switched back to Asana after trying Avaza and we now use Avaza just for time-tracking.
What we eventually realised is that task management and time-tracking aren’t the bedfellows you might first assume.
Time-tracking and profit/budget-tracking are more appropriately done at a category level than a task level, so trying to integrate task-management and time-tracking can actually compromise task-management.
@Christiaan_Briggs can I ask how you are budget tracking at a category level in Asana or what you have integrated to be able to budget track? We are a building company that is trying to use Asana to Project Manage but I need to be able track our job budgets against the project
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Hi @Mike_Kulakov, we just started using Asana and Everhour. I’m wondering if there is a way to track project costs in Everhour through Asana. Similar to their time tracking integration I would like to add costs to a project without leaving Asana. Thanks.
Can you please elaborate on how you track these costs? Is it money cost of your time, or a kind of fixed cost incurred on your project? If this is the former, then you can make a report to track time costs: Billable and cost rates - Everhour
Fixed costs can be added as expenses, but you have to leave Asana: Expenses - Everhour
If you have any further questions, feel free to shoot us an email at ask@everhour.com!
