Do you have clients on retainer who are keen to know what you’ve done in the calendar month? Do you have project sponsors who are interested what when particular tasks have been completed? Perhaps you have another need to show a filtered list of tasks and time logs?
Personally I use Toggl Track to record virtually all the work I do in any given day. But with a number of clients on retainer I wanted to show them a list of all the tasks I had completed in any given month and the time taken. This lets each client know whether additional requests will fit within that month’s allocation or if they risk some overage charges.
Here’s an example:
To make this happen is relatively easy. Here’s my workflow.
- I record each task I do in Toggl. That’s second nature these days.
- Once a task is completed Zapier copies that information and pastes it into Airtable for me. This includes the client name, the task, the date and the duration of the task.
- In Airtable I have a filtered view for each client. This shows the time logs for ONLY that client. As you can see in the image, I have also grouped these entries by month, and sorted it with the most recent month at the top.
- I then embed that filtered view into a client dashboard.
I only need to set up steps (2), (3) and (4) once and then I can just focus on doing great work for clients and tracking my time. The rest of the process is completely automated from there on. My clients can check their dashboard and always see a current list of tasks carried out in any given month. Voila!
Check the video above for a step-by-step walk through of how to piece together Toggl + Zapier + Airtable. You can use the free versions of all these tools to make this workflow.
