Tracking FreshBooks time while you work in Asana or Trello

There is no built-in link between Asana or Trello and FreshBooks time tracking. What the official extension promised, what actually connects today, and two ways to make it work.

You plan the work in Asana or Trello. You bill it from FreshBooks. Somewhere in between, the hours have to be written down, and that is where the gap is.

What was promised

The official FreshBooks Time Tracker for Chrome still tells you, in its Chrome Web Store description, that soon you will be able to "track time directly from the apps you already know and love", naming Asana and Trello. The listing was last updated in October 2022, version 3.4. That "soon" is four years old now.

What actually connects today

In January 2026 someone asked on the Asana forum whether time tracked in Asana could be sent to FreshBooks. Asana's own answer: there is no native integration. A third-party connector such as Zapier can do it.

So there are two realistic routes. A connector, or the FreshBooks timer kept open next to your project tool.

Route 1: a connector, and the two things that trip it up

Zapier's FreshBooks app has a "Create Time Entry" action. The required fields are account, started_at, duration, is_logged, and client_id. Optional: project_id, task_id, note.

Two of those fields decide whether your setup works or quietly fails.

1. The client is required. The project is optional.

That is how the FreshBooks API works, not a Zapier quirk. Your Asana project or Trello board does not know which FreshBooks client it belongs to, so you need one lookup step that maps project to client before the entry is created. One step. Skip it and the action fails every time.

2. One running timer per user.

If a timer is already running, starting a second one fails until the first is logged. We hit this ourselves while testing against the API: "You must log your current timer before starting another." So a setup that starts a timer whenever a card moves will collide with whatever timer you already have going. The configuration that breaks less is the boring one: send completed time as a logged entry, with a duration, instead of trying to start and stop timers remotely.

Route 2: pin the web timer

Open the FreshBooks Time Tracking page in a tab next to Asana or Trello and pin it. The timer runs on FreshBooks' side, not in your browser. Close the tab, close the browser, and a running timer is still there when you come back. It is also untouched by the official extension's 12-hour sign-in limit, because you are not using the extension at all.

Nothing to configure, nothing to break. Not elegant either.

Which one

If you bill by the hour and already pay for Zapier, Route 1 with logged entries is worth the hour it takes to set up. If you don't, Route 2 costs nothing and works today.

Which one are you on right now, or are the hours still going in by hand on Friday afternoon?

What we would build

We want to make a small Chrome extension for FreshBooks time tracking: search the client and project from the toolbar and start the timer right there, and stay signed in. We are not promising an Asana or Trello integration. That promise has been sitting on a store listing for four years, and we would rather ship the small thing that works.

If 30 people sign up, we build it: https://danorie.com/fbtrack

We would build this ourselves, and we are not affiliated with FreshBooks.

Related: why the official extension asks you to sign in again after 12 hours: https://danorie.com/blog/freshbooks-chrome-extension-keeps-logging-out

Sources

freshbooks · asana · trello · time-tracking