Hi all - first time post! We are currently onboarding with Hubspot.
We’re a digital agency and one of the most important things to get right is assighning work in the schedule. Essentially, we can’t sell time that we don’t have and on the flip-side, we don’t want to have days going unused.
At the moment we manage our schedule in Toggl, with different streams for each developer/designer etc. What I’d really like to be able to do is bridge these somehow, not by integration necessarily, but I want to be able to see how many days we have booked out in say, March in Hubspot. That way we can clearly see how close we are to target in the practical (rather than financial) sense.
I might close a deal in December but the time is booked out for April, so I effectively have 2 targets. I hope this makes sense and I’d love to know how other people manage this.
Thank you!
Hi @KRothDEV,
From a first glance, this looks more like a question revolving around a good process and not around connecting tools. If I understand you correctly, toggl shows you how many resources you have left in a week, month, year.
I would approach this by documenting the expected workload for different team members on the deal. Let’s say you have an account manager, a project manager, and freelancers which are already known to be required for a project with an expected workflow. For each of these roles, I would set up custom properties on the deal record. While moving the deal through your deal stages, the sales person would have to keep a close eye on expected project start date and the required resources.
I’ve worked in agencies myself so I know that this will be a balancing act but I think it’s the closest you will get to consolidating these two worlds – sales and resource management.
Once the deal reaches a certain stage / probability, I would start blocking out the time in toggl according to the logged expected resources on the deal record. This would also be the deal stage when a project start date could be confirmed / locked-in with the future customer. The deal could still be lost after, in that case the blockers would be removed. It would be your decision when exactly to block the resources in toggl.
It’s very important to assign the responsibility for checking and blocking the availability to whoever manages the deal. If this step is skipped, you might sell more than you can deliver.
There might be ways to automate this with tools like Zapier (looking up fields, creating blockers in toggl) or even third-party integrations for resource management. However, I’m not aware of any off the top of my head.
Best regards!
I’d listen to @karstenkoehler on this one, @KRothDEV 
. At our agency we use ClickUp to manage capacity, so we don’t do that in HubSpot. I’ll be sharing this answer 
with the team though. It may be something we consider, too.
Thanks Karsten and Dan. This is really helpful. What you outlined Karsten makes perfect sense, and I definitely agree that at this point I wouldn’t like to be integrating platfomrs (maybe further down the line but we’re far away from this point!). Describing it as a process that needs to be carefully managed makes sense.
We do have a ‘sales track’ in Toggl, so that the Operations Manager has an idea of what might be landing, without it being assigned work, so it’s good to hear you would recommend this. In terms of custom properties, would you have this as a number of resource days + start date?
Thanks again! So helpful 
Hi @KRothDEV,
For custom properties, I would suggest a date properties for expected project start date and expected project end date. Resources, personally, I would store as hours in a number property but that’s probably personal preference. If days make more sense for you, go for days. I would create these number properties for each relevant contributor whose resources need to be blocked.
Glad that I can help!