Track your working hours easily
Automagically track your Toggl timers on Airtable in 3 steps
Automate as much as possible
I am very obsessed with productivity and automation.
I always try to automate repetitive and boring tasks as much as possible.
One of these is certainly the monitoring of working hours (freelancers know what I'm talking about 🙄).
I think I have found a very quick and convenient solution using Toggl to manage the timers, Airtable to collect data and monitor earnings, and Zapier to connect the 2 tools.
Toggl
Toggl is a suite of tools that allows you to monitor your work through timers to which you can assign a project, a description, and a client (you can also do other things, like add tags, collaborators, etc).
It is very convenient because it is in the Cloud and you can use it from any platform. I almost always use the Chrome extension.
Simply, every time I have to monitor my work, I select or create a new project, add the client (new or already present), and start the timer.
Stop. For Toggl we are done.
Airtable
Airtable is a very powerful tool. It's a Google Sheets on steroids.
It allows you to create bases (which you can consider as Excel sheets) and do all your calculations on them, use it as a database, and much more.
In this case, I created a base with 3 tables:
Time tracker
Here are all Toggl timers, imported automatically. Each time you start a timer, a line will be created.
If the project doesn't exist, a new record will also be created in the Projects' table.
Project
As the title suggests, here are all the projects.
You can either create them manually or let Toggl create them (which will only take care of entering the Name and Worked Hours).
The only field to be filled in manually is Status (Todo, In Progress, and Done).
The Revenue column is automatically generated from the related payouts' sum, in the Payouts table (Revenue / h is automatically calculated based on Revenue).
Payouts
In this table, we find the payments, finally 🙌.
Basically, you will have to enter them manually (for now), then invent an Id (if you want), connect the related Project, enter the Amount, choose the Origin, and flag if the payment has already occurred (Payment collected).
But this is only the starting point.
You can link your Gumroad, Paypal, Shopify, etc. account and automatically populate the table (then you will link the transaction Id to table Id).
Cool right?
Here's what the project looks like
If you don't have an Airtable account (referral link)
Zapier
And in the end, he arrives. The only one. Zapier.
For those unfamiliar with it, this tool is used to connect one service to another.
So if one service does this (trigger), the other service does that (action). Simple.
So we shouldn't do anything but select Toggl and Airtable.