If your team is tracking time in one tool, managing work in another, and trying to keep project budgets under control somewhere else entirely, Asana’s Timesheets and Budgets add-on is a pretty meaningful update.
We’ve worked with plenty of teams who relied on tools like Harvest or Toggl for time tracking while using Asana for project management. That setup can work, but it also creates friction. Time data lives in one place, project plans live somewhere else, and it becomes harder to spot budget issues early. With Timesheets and Budgets, Asana brings more of that workflow into the same system your team is already using.
Why Asana Timesheets and Budgets matter
The big advantage here is visibility.
When time tracking, estimated effort, and project budgets all live inside Asana, managers get a much clearer picture of what’s happening. You can see how much work is planned, how much time has actually been logged, and whether a project is heading toward budget overrun before it becomes a bigger problem.
For agencies, consultants, and service-based teams especially, that’s a big deal. But even internal teams can benefit if they want a better handle on team capacity, workload, and where time is really going.
How to set up Timesheets and Budgets in Asana
Before anyone starts tracking time, there’s a bit of admin setup to work through.
Timesheets and Budgets is sold as an add-on, so the first step is making sure the right people have licenses assigned. From there, an admin can review the timesheet settings and decide how the feature should work for the business.
This is where you make a few important choices:
- whether people can track billable and non-billable time
- whether timesheets need manager approval before they’re finalized
- whether you want to use timesheet categories for deeper reporting
- whether time should only be tracked on tasks rather than directly on projects
- whether the team can log future time entries
- how long timesheets stay editable before they’re locked
These settings shape the experience quite a bit. For example, if you care about client billing, billable versus non-billable time matters. If your goal is just internal productivity tracking, you may want to keep things simpler.
One setting I’d pay close attention to is the approval workflow. If managers need to review time before it’s finalized, that gives you an extra layer of quality control, especially when tracked time may eventually be used for invoicing or client reporting.
How to set up project budgets around hours or cost
Once the admin setup is done, the next step is creating a budget inside a project.
Asana gives you two main ways to do this.
The first is cost-based budgeting. That works well if different people bill at different hourly rates and you want project spend to update based on who is logging time.
The second is hours-based budgeting. This is the simpler option and, for a lot of teams, probably the more practical one. If you know a project should take 20 hours in total, you can track progress against that number and see how much budget remains as the work unfolds.
At MinorCo, we generally prefer budgeting with hours because it keeps planning straightforward and makes it easier to compare estimated effort against actual effort. It also works nicely when you’re trying to manage delivery capacity without overcomplicating the setup.
Asana also lets you turn on estimated time, which I’d strongly recommend. Once that field is added to the project, your team can estimate time on individual tasks and compare those estimates against the total project budget. That gives you a much better sense of whether the scope still fits the budget before the work is finished.
A simple example: if a project has a 20-hour budget and your current tasks already add up to 18 hours of estimated time, you know there’s not much room left. That’s the kind of early warning that helps you avoid nasty surprises later.
How your team can track time in Asana tasks
This is the part that will matter most to the people doing the work day to day.
Team members can log time directly from tasks, which is probably the cleanest way to do it. The task already contains the context: what the work is, when it’s due, who owns it, the relevant notes, attachments, and conversation. Logging time there keeps everything connected.
There are two ways to track time:
- start and stop a timer while working on the task
- enter time manually after the fact
In reality, most teams will end up using both. Timers are great in theory, but people forget to start them, forget to stop them, or switch between tasks too quickly. Manual entry is often the more realistic option, especially for teams doing a mix of meetings, client work, and admin.
The nice part is that Asana supports both approaches. You can log time, mark it as billable or non-billable, add notes, and review previous entries on the same task.
If you want to make adoption easier, it’s worth showing your team how the Timesheets view works too. That weekly view gives each person a simple place to review everything they’ve logged, catch anything they missed, and submit their week for approval if you’ve turned that on.
How to review and approve timesheets in Asana
If your workflow includes approvals, reviewers can handle that inside Asana as well.
Once a team member submits their timesheet, the reviewer gets notified and can open the submitted entries to check what was logged. They can see the projects involved, review notes from the person who submitted the timesheet, and in some cases edit entries if something needs correcting.
That matters because approvals aren’t just about admin. They’re a chance to sanity-check what’s been tracked.
Was enough time logged?
Was it assigned to the right task?
Should it be billable or non-billable?
Does anything look off before this gets used for reporting or billing?
For managers, this creates a simple weekly habit. For teams, it creates a bit more accountability without needing a separate system.
How dashboards and portfolios help you spot budget issues early
One of the most useful parts of the feature is what happens after the setup is done and the team is actually using it.
Once estimated time and actual time are flowing into your projects, you can start surfacing that information in dashboards and portfolios.
Inside a project, you can monitor how much time has been estimated, how much has been logged, and how much budget is still available. That gives project managers a live read on whether things are staying on track.
At the portfolio level, this becomes even more powerful. If you’re managing multiple client projects at once, you can bring budget-related fields into a portfolio view and get a much more useful high-level picture of delivery. Instead of waiting until the end of the month to find out something ran over, you can see pressure building earlier and respond sooner.
That’s especially helpful for agencies and consulting teams where margin often depends on staying close to budget across a lot of active projects.
What to know before you roll out Asana Timesheets and Budgets
As promising as this feature is, it’s not perfect yet.
The first limitation is invoicing. Asana can track actual time and separate billable from non-billable work, but it doesn’t currently generate invoices from that data. You can export time entries and move them into your invoicing system, but there’s still a handoff involved.
The second limitation is recurring or resettable budgets. At the moment, budgets are set for the total life of a project. If you run monthly retainers and want a budget that resets every month, that workflow still isn’t quite there natively.
Those aren’t small details, especially for service businesses. Still, for a relatively new add-on, this is a strong start. The core functionality is already useful, and it feels like the sort of feature Asana will keep improving.
Who should use Asana Timesheets and Budgets
This add-on will make the most sense for teams who need tighter visibility into effort and spend.
That includes:
- agencies managing multiple client projects
- consultants tracking billable versus non-billable work
- professional services teams trying to stay inside project budgets
- internal operations teams that want better visibility into where time is going
If your team has outgrown basic task management and needs better budget control without stitching together multiple tools, this is worth a serious look.
Final thoughts
Asana Timesheets and Budgets closes a gap a lot of teams have been feeling for a while.
Instead of managing work in Asana and tracking time somewhere else, you can now keep much more of that process in one place. That makes it easier to plan work, log effort, review timesheets, and keep an eye on project budgets before they go sideways.
It’s not a complete replacement for every time-tracking or billing workflow yet, but it’s a big step in the right direction.
If you’re already using Asana to run client work or internal projects, this is one of the more useful updates we’ve seen in a while.
Want Help Setting This Up?
If you’d like help setting up Asana Timesheets and Budgets for your team, you can book an introductory call here: https://minorco.com/asana-consulting/