I am trying to come up with a way to track time we spend on tasks for customers. I was planing on using a variety of time notes in the task notes, for example “5 min”, that would trigger and update a company property “Monthly Engagement Effort” by .083 hours. I then was going to run monthly reporting on that number to give me a better idea of effort on certain customers.
I have it working on a single use basis, but the issue is I am struggling to come up with is a good renrollment trigger that will re-enroll only new tasks that we do. Any ideas?
Could you share your workflow enrollment triggers and more context as to which tasks are being enrolled and which aren’t?
Your approach is very interesting, hadn’t thought about it that way. I also want to share that there are a few time and expense tracking apps which integrate with HubSpot. for example PSOhub. There are also tools like Clockify (picks up the name of ticket records), TMetric (timer button for HubSpot tasks) or Hourstack (also for tasks) which seem to work well with HubSpot.
I looked at a couple, but the idea of adding another system to work out of as I am trying to consolodate just wasn’t appealing. The trigger I was using was searching the note of tasks for the time notes so, 5 min/ 10min/ 1 hr etc. so only tasks that are project tasks get used where as other sales tasks they don’t tag time on won’t be. I couldn’t figure out how I would re-enroll though because I was going off the task and needed to somehow tie it to the company. I played with some ideas around the time I was updating but didn’t find what I wanted. I ended up doing it differently, but it’s not ideal. I built a drop down with all of the time options and now a user can select it, the workflow runs and adds it to the montly and the lifetime totals then adds them to a google sheet for me to go back and audit if need be. It then changes the property back from their selection to “select time” with a re-enrollment trigger of anything that isn’t a selectable time i.e that “Select time” place holder re-enrolls.
So far this has worked and is at least allowing my team to log time as they work and complete tasks but I would prefer a way to associate the task to the time it took. If I can ever figure out a good re-enrollment trigger for the other option I’ll switch back but at least the time is being fed to the same storage container to I should be able to switch pretty easily.
Correct, re-enrollment is the biggest hurdle here. The only other approach I see here would be via active lists since these can be used for re-enrollment:
If you can figure out a way for contacts to leave this list and re-enter once the next task is created, this could be used for your workflow. I was thinking “Task completion date is less than x days ago”, but this type of filter isn’t available unfortunately.
Currently, your custom property solution seems like the best option.
@karstenkoehler thanks for the perspective. I figured I had ended up at a dead end with the available triggers but wanted to get another set of eyes on the issue to make sure.I’ve only been in this system for a week so I wasn’t sure if I was missing something.
I recently worked out a process to do something similar so it should work for you as well, the only limitation would be that it can only be run once a day, based on the “Less than 1 Day ago” filter being the shortest amount of time. It will require a total of three workflows (including your existing one) and 2 new properties for your contacts.
First, to make the re-enrollment work out, make 2 new properties on your contacts, a Date picker “Date of last Task” or something of that nature and a Single Checkbox called “Task completed in the last Day”. Then in your original workflow, you will add a new step that sets that date as the date of the step.
You will also add a step that changes the checkbox to Yes.
You then create a second workflow which will trigger off of
Date of Last Task is more than 1 day ago
Task completed in the last day is known
and the action to Set the property “Task Completed in the last day” to No.
You can then create a third workflow for contacts which triggers off of
that Property being known and
Less than 1 day ago and
Task completed in the last day is No and
the task being completed (This should be the same Trigger as your current single-use workflow)
and the action to re-enroll in the original workflow.
I know this isn’t a perfect solution, as it more runs a check each day to see if any tasks have been completed and re-enrolls contacts accordingly, but you may be able to fiddle with the overall idea to make it work for you. Hope this helps!
If you have access to custom objects in your HubSpot portal(s), you might be interested in StopWatch for HubSpot (a simple time tracking app designed to exist entirely within HubSpot). It allows you to track time against Contacts, Companies, Deals and Tickets using a “StopWatch” interface in the right sidebar on an individual record view, with the resulting “Time Logs” saved as custom object records within your HubSpot account. If you are interested, you can find the app’s usage guide here.
Hope you give it a try. Let me know if you have any questions
An update on this -- StopWatch no longer requires access to HubSpot Custom Objects, and is now compatible with all HubSpot subscription tiers (including free).
