A Toggl retainer report your client can bookmark.
Toggl Track exports the CSV in two clicks. HourTab turns it into a public URL your retainer client opens any time — no login, no portal, no per-user seat. “How many hours do I have left this month?” answered before they ask.
Free forever for your first retainer · no credit card · CSV in, URL out.
What your client sees
- Oct 3 API sync debug 3h
- Oct 7 Onboarding call 1h
- Oct 12 Landing copy revisions 2h
- Oct 18 DB migration review 4h
- Oct 22 Weekly status 2h
One URL per retainer. Bookmarked once, always current. The item rows are pulled straight from your Toggl description + duration columns.
Why HourTab instead of a Toggl shared report link
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Toggl’s shared report is a spreadsheet. Yours is a progress bar.
Toggl’s public report link is useful for auditors; it’s not useful for a client who just wants to know “how close are we to the cap.” HourTab leads with the number that matters: 8 hours remain. The full log is still there — it’s just below the fold.
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Cycle-aware, not date-range-aware.
A Toggl report is a date range. A retainer is a cycle — it resets. HourTab understands “20 hours / month, renews the 1st” and rolls the number over automatically. Your client sees this month, not whatever date range you happened to pick.
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One URL per retainer, not per report.
Your Acme retainer and your Globex retainer each get their own public URL. Clients bookmark once. When you log new hours in Toggl and re-import the CSV, the URL they already bookmarked just updates.
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No tracker lock-in.
Today it’s Toggl. If you switch to Harvest, Clockify, or a Google Sheet, HourTab accepts that CSV too. Same URL, same client, nothing to re-bookmark.
The flow, start to finish
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1. Export from Toggl
Reports → Detailed → filter by the retainer client tag → “Download CSV.” Two clicks. (Same flow Toggl users already use for invoicing.)
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2. Paste into HourTab
Drag the CSV into your HourTab retainer, or paste its contents. We auto-map Toggl’s columns (
Description,Start date,Duration) — no manual field picking. -
3. Send the URL once
One message to the client: “Here’s your always-current retainer page — bookmark it.” They do. They stop asking. You stop writing mid-month status emails.
Toggl + HourTab FAQ
Is there a native Toggl integration (OAuth)?
Not at v1. CSV is faster to first-value — no OAuth scopes to approve, no IT review at your client’s end, and the CSV schema has been stable for years. Native Toggl OAuth is on the roadmap once we have paying Toggl users; reply to the early-access email and we’ll ping you when it ships.
What columns do you need from Toggl’s CSV?
Three: Start date, Description, Duration. Everything else Toggl exports (user, project, billable, tag, etc.) is ignored. If you filter your Toggl report by a client tag before exporting, everything in the CSV belongs to one retainer — no server-side matching needed.
How does the client see updates?
Re-export the CSV in Toggl, paste the new version into HourTab, done. The public URL updates instantly. Most users do this once a week during their Friday admin block.
What if my client is a Toggl user too?
They probably won’t open Toggl to check someone else’s hours. HourTab is the client-facing layer; Toggl stays the tracking layer. Same data, different audience.
Does this work for fixed-fee projects, not just hourly retainers?
Sort of. If you’re tracking hours against a fixed-fee quote (“this project is scoped at 40 hours”), HourTab works exactly the same way — set the cap, import the CSV, share the URL. The difference is just whether the cap resets monthly or when the project ends.
Your Toggl data. A URL your client actually opens.
One email when we launch. That’s the only one you get.