Fixing Time-Tracking Chaos Caused by a Renamed Toggl Label

Table of Contents

1. Renaming a Toggl project broke five Zaps before lunch

It was one of those regular Tuesdays that turns into digital quicksand by 11am. I renamed a project in Toggl from Client Support to Client Support – Retained to be polite for invoicing. Didn’t think twice. Fifteen minutes later, Asana was still piping in task names, but the Zap that logs hours into the shared Airtable budget view stopped cold. No errors. No timestamps. Nothing.

Turns out, when you rename a project in Toggl, its unique project ID stays the same (Toggl doesn’t delete or replace the entity), but Zapier’s Toggl “New Time Entry” trigger only refreshes static project name data on reconnect — not in realtime. This means any filters in Zapier that referenced the project name as a condition just silently… shrug.

I had 5 Zaps with filters like Project name contains 'Support'. They all failed because the name changed. No alerts. No failed tasks. Just skipped because the condition returned false now. Same project ID? Still not enough.

I only caught it because our daily Notion dashboard, which pulls billable hours via webhook, was showing unusually quiet days. Quiet is suspicious around here.

2. The New Time Entry trigger fires again after reconnecting

There’s a subtle behavioral landmine built into the Zapier integration for Toggl. When you reconnect the Toggl account (which you inevitably do after changing labels, projects, or experimenting with filters), it re-indexes recent time entries and tries to backfill them.

It’s not documented anywhere obvious, but if you’ve previously used a Filter or Formatter step that ignores some time entries based on the old name, those old entries can suddenly get re-processed with this new round of data. If you have an Action step that logs to a spreadsheet or Airtable, expect weird dupes.

This is extra cursed if your Zap includes a Create Record step with no unique ID or deduplication — like when I saw five identical Airtable rows magically appear during a test run I wasn’t expecting to be live. I only realized it was the Zap when I hovered over the Clockify-derived timestamps. Yep, from three days ago. Four duplicates. All in the wrong quarter column.

3. Filters using project name should be replaced with project ID

If you’ve ever clicked into a Toggl time entry’s raw JSON via Zapier’s test data inspector (specifically from the Trigger Test screen), you’ll notice project and project_id both show up. But the project name is the human-readable label and is not unique if reused across multiple workspaces or clients. The ID is a stable string that doesn’t change even if the name does.

I now override the trigger data with a Formatter step early in the Zap to translate project_id into a stable name using a lookup table. Yes, it’s manual, but it makes the filter logic airtight. I keep a central lookup table in Airtable with all Toggl project IDs and their safe names. Learned the hard way after miscategorizing 14 hours of work under the wrong client — they had two sub-brands with nearly identical names (“Circl” and “CircleTech”).

Use a Formatter Utilities step to map project_id to readable label
Reference project_id in filters, not name
Pull exports from Toggl once a month to refresh mapping table
Never filter within the trigger — always use separate Filter steps
Label shared client work with prefixes, not suffixes
Audit Airtable entries monthly for duplicate duration timestamps

4. Safari autofill kept reverting Toggl API tokens

I didn’t even notice this one at first. Every time I added a new Toggl account into Zapier to test something (we segment logins per client), I’d paste the API token, click Continue, get a success message… and then watch Zapier instantly fail on test data with a 403 error.

Turns out Safari was autofilling username and password fields invisibly when the Toggl auth modal popped up. It even replaced the token I’d just pasted with an old one from my personal account. Side effect: all Zaps created in that session would look fine, test fine, and then fire silently into a permissions void.

Temporary fix: switch to Chrome when connecting Toggl or aggressively clear Safari’s password autofill cache (which is hidden in the obscure Preferences panel — you won’t find this unless you’re digging on MDN at 2am asking “why is this field submitting something I didn’t type?”).

5. Time rounding in Toggl exports does not match dashboard totals

Minor panic moment: our team leads were comparing reported hours from the Toggl dashboard to the exported CSV we use as the base for monthly time audits. The numbers didn’t match. Not off by much — maybe 4 to 12 minute variance per person — but consistently off.

It’s not a timezone thing. It’s rounding. Toggl rounds time blocks based on visible UI, but exports raw decimal values. That means a 17-minute entry is visible as “0.3h” in the dashboard but comes through as 0.283333 in the CSV. As you collect log entries, the discrepancy grows. Unless you round after the fact, you’ll never match dashboard totals.

“If you sum the CSV and not the dashboard, you’ll underreport by several billable increments per month over time.”

The workaround? Preprocess exported data through a script (I use a Node cron job via Pipedream) that rounds each entry to the nearest minute, then recalculates daily and monthly totals with that adjusted column.

6. The Toggl Chrome extension ignores archived projects by default

This one’s not obvious until you’re six weeks into a campaign and realize half your team has been logging time to stale projects. If you archive a project in Toggl (because it’s finished or migrated), it no longer appears in the Chrome extension dropdown — but existing entries can still be logged against it via API or Zapier.

So when someone uses a pinned task or browser auto-suggest to start a timer, it can end up tied to an archived project you thought nobody could access. You won’t catch it visually because the name shows up like normal. And neither the mobile app nor the Zap history flags this as invalid — it’s just a dead project holding ghost time.

We found this after syncing Toggl data into Notion using Make.com and spotting a campaign tagged with a project we retired two quarters ago. Recovered 6 hours from the ghost zone. You can toggle display of archived projects in the Chrome extension settings, but it resets silently after updates or new workspaces.

7. Incremental tag filtering fails when multiple users track simultaneously

The Toggl API trigger in Zapier doesn’t handle arrays particularly well — especially with tags. If two users are logging time simultaneously, each tagging their entry with multiple labels (e.g. #meeting, #internal), the order of those tags sometimes shifts in the payload. That breaks any filter logic that says “Tag is exactly ‘meeting'” because it’s comparing a string to an array or to mismatched serialization depending on order.

It gets dicier if you’re using paths like tag[0] or tag[1], which aren’t stable. Trigger output may show tag[0] = invoices one minute, and five minutes later it’s something else for the same workflow, same form. No UI change. Just a shift in array order pushed from Toggl’s webhook system, possibly caused by user field sequence during logging.

Best move? Normalize tags into a single search string in Formatter:

Input: ["meeting", "internal"]
Formatter (Text → Join array): meeting,internal
Use Filter: Text contains ‘meeting’

This catches the condition regardless of order or missing fields. Slightly wonky for multi-condition filters, but safer than relying on array position.

8. Summary emails from Toggl exclude entries with no descriptions

This one’s subtle. Team members logging time fast — phone calls, brainstorm sessions, doodling ideas — often skip the description field. Especially if they just want to track for themselves or forget to backfill. Toggl allows this silently. No errors. The timer runs. Data gets saved.

But the email summary you get from Toggl’s weekly recap excludes blank-description blocks from the interface, or collapses them depending on group settings. You never see them unless you export full data or build a dashboard on top like in Notion or Coda. We caught it because internal totals were weirdly low but manual exports had hours that the summary forgot.

If your team uses email recaps to validate work done, you’re probably missing stuff. I now auto-scan for any blanks in the description column during Airtable import and ping people in Slack via a Make webhook. The bot message is annoyingly specific: “Hey, your 12:30pm–1:15pm time block has no description. Mind adding context?”