Estimated Hours in Asana, Instagannt & Everhour

We use Asana, Everhour & Instagannt, these work brilliantly together. Each task in a project has an estimate of time taken which is set using Everhour, this is really neat and the total estimated project time is displayed at the top of each project and we can hit start/stop on a task and at the end of a project see if we are over or under budget. Since Timeline was introduced, we have now looked again at Instagannt and found that it integrates really well and we can present the client with a read-only Gannt chart of their project with only the info on that we want them to see. Really well except that Instagannt can’t seem to see the estimated hours in Asana and wants me to create a new custom field entitled “Estimated Hours” or it will apend the task with the time in brackets. Obviously I don’t want to have to set up and monitor two separate systems. I don’t know which company to direct this at, is one refusing to integrate this functionality for fear of losing business? Or is this just an oversight and might get fixed soon?

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Looping in @danielguajardok, as he’ll be able to address your Instagantt questions :slight_smile: cc @Matt_Bramlage

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Thanks for looping me in @Alexis!

Rob, I’m not sure how Everhour stores their estimated hours. When you’re premium, we store them in a custom field called Estimated Hours than can not only be read from inside Asana, but it can be managed by any other app. This is the easiest way to make it available for multi-integration.

We’ve tried to reach the Everhour team with no luck in the past. @Alexis do you know if there’s anyone from their team in the community?

@Alexis @danielguajardok My name is Waclaw, a Customer Success manager from Everhour. You can address all questions to me or on our general email address which is ask at everhour.com.

Speaking about custom fields, we have our own task estimates that have no connection to your Estimated hours in custom fields. We can’t use your custom fields exactly that way Asana users do because we need to see a reported time prior to add any information to our database and show it in reports. We do, however, display your custom fields in our reports provided that you have time reported into it. This is a blog post that describes how it works.

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Thanks for the quick and informative replies, it sounds like this is about how Everhour deals with estimated time and that they don’t intend to address this, so a workaround needs to be found. Can Asana have a custom field that copies what Everhour’s estimates are? That way other apps can use this info. I don’t see anything in Zapier that helps.

It is indeed Everhour that uses Asana only as source of Tasks and everything else keeps in own database. Thankfully they’d started offering API (in BETA) this year, thus it becomes possible to export their Estimated Hours and Used Hours and record that in Asana. But there is no tool to provide this functionality yet, and Everhour refuses to implement this (at least I was not able to convince them).

Instagantt uses Estimated Hours Custom field from Asana (if it is available), and that works great, until you start using subtasks, and after that you need to have some workaround, to add all subtasks to some project that has that Estimated Hours field for Instagantt to use it instead of title. I hadn’t found one yet.

Instagantt additionally has “Progress” (not Custom Field support yet) for every task, but it is not “Used Hours” in any way, thus no chance to integrate that with Everhour. It looks like Instagantt should add extra field support, but that would change tool paradigm. Instagantt is used for planning, not introspection.

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Actually we will be incorporating an “Actual Hours” field soon, as part of our Budgeting feature. It will Sync with Custom Fields. We will also offer Progress as sync to Custom fields :slight_smile:

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This may sound-counter intuitive to you, but I would like to have the ability for estimated and actual hours to be “arbitrarily” assigned to people on tasks. Meaning, even if I have a task assigned to person “A”, I would like to be able to estimate hours on that task for persons A, B, and C – whomever. This is needed because the way our jobs are estimated, we may have supervisory or other hours to account for, even if that person doesn’t have actual tasks to complete in Asana.

Also, we use subtasks for approval workflows, and there are two issues – one, we can’t easily add custom fields to subtasks, and two, we usually don’t know how many review rounds we are going to need for approval. So what I want to see is the ability to put estimated hours for everyone in the approval workflow up at the parent task level.

As we are speaking about Custom Fields related integration with Asana, I’d ask for a feature request:

I want to be able to choose which Custom Field to use (i.e. what field to use for Instagantt Estimated Hours, for Progress and Actual Hours), and not to rely on field name, since field names can change and can conflict with other uses (especially if more tools like Instagantt start using Custom Fields). In my case we have “Used Hours” and we’d like Instagantt to use it and not to introduce yet another one for the same purpose.

I get why you’d like to just “choose the field that instagantt uses”. But I have a feeling this is MUCH harder than it sounds to program and would require a lot of extra processing and database power.

Having said that, can you not just rename your “Used Hours” to Estimated Hours? I realize your company may be used to seeing the first… but surely you can make this change? Maybe I’m not understanding your issue or maybe this isn’t how the integration works. I’ve not actually used it.

This is something that its definitely on our roadmap. As @Matthew_Burt mentioned, it’s a little bit more complicated, but it’s definitely on our roadmap :slight_smile:

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When I use multiple integrations, they can have different assumptions about field name to use for specific concept, thus to orchestrate them I need majority of the integrations to be able to have the field name configurable.

This is why I am asking Daniel to add that to Instagantt, because the sooner I have this configurability the easier it would be for me to achieve integrations cooperation goal.

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I’m interested in using Instagantt + Asana + Everhour at my agency, too - but I’m worried that we’ll miss Harvest Forecast (despite how rudimentary it is.) Did you look at using Zapier or another integration tool to sync Estimated Hours between Everhour and Asana?

Which cases does Instagannt have that the new Asana Timeline doesn’t?

We did a great job at Everhour to substitute Forecast for you, Erin. Please check out our Schedule

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