Migrate from BigTime to Asana

BigTime Projects map directly to Asana Projects. All standard fields (Project name, status, start/end dates, budget, client assignment) migrate. Active and Archived status from BigTime maps to Asana's Archived project state. Custom Fields on Projects in BigTime migrate as Asana custom fields on the Project, preserving field labels and all populated values. Asana's Project is the central organizing entity on both platforms, making this the most straightforward 1:1 mapping.

BigTime Staff records (name, email, role, department, billable rate, cost rate) map to Asana Users. We match by email address for deduplication. BigTime role-based permissions (Admin, Manager, Staff) do not map directly to Asana's Member and Guest roles; we document the original BigTime role in a custom text field on the Asana User profile for reference. Active staff in BigTime become active Asana Users; archived staff are imported as inactive Users at the customer's discretion.

BigTime Clients (the billing entity with contact details, billing address, and payment terms) have no native equivalent in Asana because Asana is not a CRM. We discuss three options during scoping: (1) represent each Client as an Asana Team with the client name, (2) store Client name and contact details in Project-level custom fields, or (3) use an external CRM alongside Asana for client management. The customer chooses the convention, and we apply it consistently across all migrated Projects.

BigTime Time Entries (project association, staff member, date, hours, billable/non-billable flag, task-level detail) map to Asana Tasks with custom numeric fields for hours and billable status. We create Asana custom fields (number type) for Billable Hours and Non-Billable Hours on each Project, and populate them from the corresponding BigTime time entry records. Already-invoiced time entries are flagged with a custom single-select field Invoice Status set to Invoiced to prevent double-billing.

BigTime Expense records (project association, expense code, amount, date, vendor, receipt reference) map to Asana Tasks with a custom currency field for Amount, a text field for Vendor, and a text field for Expense Code. Receipt attachment references from BigTime migrate as attachment links on the corresponding Asana Task if the customer has an Asana Premium or Business plan supporting attachments. Expense codes become a custom dropdown field in Asana that the customer populates post-migration.

BigTime Invoices and Invoice Drafts do not have a native equivalent in Asana. We extract all invoice records (draft, sent, paid, voided) as a structured CSV export during migration, tagging each with its BigTime status and associated time entries and expenses. The CSV is delivered to the customer as a billing handoff document. For customers using QuickBooks alongside BigTime, we recommend migrating invoice records directly into QuickBooks rather than Asana, since Asana has no native invoicing module. Unsent drafts require explicit confirmation from the customer before we close them out, to avoid premature billing.

BigTime Resource Allocations (staff assignments to projects with scheduled hours and capacity) map to Asana as Task Assignees with estimated hours stored in a custom number field. BigTime's capacity planning and utilization reporting (available on Advanced and Premier tiers) cannot be natively reproduced in Asana without the Timesheets add-on and Workload view on Business tier. We document every BigTime resource allocation as a structured data record in the migration deliverable so the customer's admin can manually assign or rebuild in Asana's Workload view post-migration.

BigTime's Scheduled vs Actual report captures planned hours, costs, and revenue against tracked values on a per-project basis. We extract these as a linked dataset during migration rather than a native object. On the Asana side, we create custom number fields on each Project for Budgeted Hours and Actual Hours, populated from the BigTime report where available. Actual vs budget variance calculations are documented as a reporting recommendation (Asana Business-tier dashboards or a BI tool connection) rather than migrated as a live report.

BigTime Custom Fields on Projects migrate to Asana Project-level custom fields of equivalent type: text, number, currency, checkbox, dropdown, and URL are all supported. We preserve the field label and all populated values; empty values are left blank. Dropdown options in BigTime migrate as Asana dropdown field values. If a BigTime custom field name conflicts with an existing Asana field name in the destination workspace, we append a suffix (e.g., _bt) to differentiate.

File attachments on BigTime Projects, Expenses, and Time Entries migrate as Asana attachments on the corresponding Task or Project. We preserve filename, file type, file size, and uploader metadata. The attachment content (the actual file blob) is downloaded from BigTime and re-uploaded to Asana via the Asana REST API. Large files exceeding Asana's 100MB per-file limit are flagged and delivered as a downloadable ZIP with a reference link on the Asana record.

Tags applied to BigTime Projects or Expenses migrate as Asana Tags (previously Labels) on the corresponding record. Tag metadata migrates as-is. Asana Tags are not hierarchical; if BigTime tags use a hierarchical taxonomy, we flatten them into a comma-separated tag string and flag the flattening for manual reorganization in Asana if the customer requires a nested taxonomy.

BigTime's configurable Workflows and Approval Chains (available on Advanced tier) represent process automation specific to BigTime's PSA model. These do not migrate to Asana because the trigger conditions, action types, and approval routing logic differ fundamentally between platforms. We deliver a written inventory of every active BigTime Workflow and Approval Chain: trigger event, conditions, assigned approvers, and downstream actions. The customer's Asana admin rebuilds these as Asana Rules (automations) or, for complex multi-step approval chains, documents them for implementation via an Asana certified partner.