Hubstaff exports three ways and imports none of them
Hubstaff exports timesheet data as PDF, CSV or QuickBooks format, with no plan gate on the export itself. What it does not document is a route back: its help centre covers importing team members and time off balances, and nothing for importing historical time entries. Data leaves Hubstaff easily and does not return the same way, which matters if you are consolidating accounts or arriving from another tracker. Checked against Hubstaff's support documentation on 14 August 2026.
How do you export timesheets from Hubstaff?
Open Timesheets in the left sidebar and choose View & edit. Set the date range and the people or projects you want, then use Export and pick your format. QuickBooks format is offered alongside CSV and PDF, which tells you something about who Hubstaff expects to be pulling the file: this is payroll and payables data as much as it is project reporting.
Reports elsewhere in Hubstaff follow the same pattern. Most export as CSV or PDF, and several also offer the QuickBooks option.
Collapsed or expanded changes what you get
When exporting a report as CSV, Hubstaff offers two shapes. A collapsed report shows the group totals at the bottom of the report. An expanded report shows all data rows without totals. Pick expanded if the file is going into a spreadsheet where you will do your own arithmetic, and collapsed if someone is going to read the totals as they are.
There is also a per-entity behaviour worth knowing. The export shows one line for each entity tracked, so if you enable per-task data you get a line for each task plus a single line showing time tracked against the project alone. That project line is not a duplicate of the task lines, and treating it as one will undercount.
Why the CSV looks broken when you open it
This is the most common practical problem with a Hubstaff export and it has nothing to do with your data. The CSV Hubstaff produces is encoded in UTF-8. Double-clicking the file opens it in Excel with whatever encoding Excel guesses, which for anything containing accented characters, non-Latin names or currency symbols means visible nonsense.
Hubstaff's documented fix is to import the file rather than open it: use Excel's import process, specify the encoding as UTF-8, which appears as 65001, and set the delimiter to comma. The file was always fine. Excel simply needed telling.
Scheduled reports, and where the plan gate actually sits
Manual exports are not gated by plan, but automation is. Scheduled reports, which email a report on a recurring basis rather than making someone remember to pull it, are available on Grow plans and up. Grow is limited to three scheduled reports; Team and Enterprise have no limit.
If you are pulling the same weekly payroll file by hand every Friday, that is the feature you are paying for on the higher tiers, rather than access to the data itself.
For anything programmatic, Hubstaff has an API with a documented rate limit of 1,000 requests per hour per app. That is comfortable for a periodic sync and tight for a bulk historical pull, so a one-off migration script needs to page carefully rather than fetch everything at once.
What can you import into Hubstaff?
Less than you would expect, and this is the asymmetry that defines Hubstaff among its competitors. Its documentation covers two import routes:
- Team members: Bulk upload your member list via CSV, XLS or XLSX to add people to the organization.
- Time off balances: CSV or XLS, with the file containing User email, Policy name and Balance.
There is no documented route for importing historical time entries. That does not prove none exists, and the API is the obvious avenue for anyone willing to write against it, but nothing in the support material describes a supported file path for bringing a work history in.
The practical consequence is worth stating plainly, because it cuts both ways. If you are moving to Hubstaff, plan on your history staying where it is and Hubstaff starting from the day you switch. If you are moving away from Hubstaff, the export side is straightforward and none of this applies to you.
Where can Hubstaff data go next?
Your CSV is clean once the encoding is handled, so the question is what each destination will accept.
| Destination | Takes a CSV import? | What to expect |
|---|---|---|
| Clockify | Yes, the most capable in this group | Projects, clients, tasks, tags, time entries, timesheets and users, up to 10 MB and 200,000 rows. Headers must be in English and match Clockify's own naming exactly |
| Toggl Track | Yes, with a small ceiling | 1 MB maximum, workspace admins only, active users only. A long Hubstaff history needs splitting into batches |
| Harvest | Yes, but reshaped | Eight columns, admin only. It cannot import start and end times, only durations, so Hubstaff's timestamps do not survive. Re-importing creates duplicates |
| Timely | Not from Hubstaff | Timely imports projects and clients directly from Toggl and Harvest only |
| Jibble | Not from Hubstaff | Jibble publishes import tools for several competitors, but Hubstaff is not among them |
Nobody publishes a direct Hubstaff importer, which is the mirror image of Hubstaff not documenting a time entry import of its own. Moving in either direction means a file and some column work.
If you are comparing where to land, Toggl and Clockify both gate CSV behind a paid plan, which is the opposite trade to Hubstaff's.
How do you move Hubstaff data into Timen?
Timen reads Hubstaff through its API rather than a file, so the CSV encoding problem and the column mapping both disappear. Open Settings in Timen, go to the Import tab, choose Hubstaff, and authorise the connection. Hubstaff uses OAuth with PKCE, so the sign-in happens on Hubstaff's side and Timen never sees your password. You then pick the organization and choose what to bring across.
| In Hubstaff | In Timen | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Clients | Clients | Created as client records with their projects attached |
| Projects | Projects | Created under their client where one exists |
| Tasks | Tags | Hubstaff has no tags of its own, so its tasks arrive as Timen tags |
| Team members | Team members | Matched to your Timen team so entries keep their owner |
| Time entries | Time entries | Imported with their start and end times |
| Invoices | Invoices | Imported |
One thing worth being clear about: Hubstaff's activity monitoring, screenshots and app-usage data are not part of this. Timen does not have an equivalent and does not import them. If those records matter to you, export them from Hubstaff separately before closing the account, because they are the part of Hubstaff that has no counterpart anywhere in this comparison.
If you are still weighing the move, the alternatives worth considering covers the shortlist, and a direct comparison covers where the two differ on monitoring and billing.
Common questions about exporting Hubstaff data
- How do you export timesheet data from Hubstaff?
- Go to Timesheets in the left sidebar, choose View and edit, then click Export and pick QuickBooks format, CSV or PDF. Reports elsewhere in Hubstaff export as CSV or PDF, and some also offer QuickBooks.
- Why does a Hubstaff CSV look wrong in Excel?
- The file is UTF-8 encoded. Double-clicking it lets Excel guess the encoding and mangle the characters. Use Excel's import process instead and specify UTF-8, encoding 65001, with comma delimiters.
- Can you import time entries into Hubstaff?
- Hubstaff documents importing team members via CSV, XLS or XLSX, and importing time off balances via CSV or XLS. It does not document a route for importing historical time entries, so moving a history into Hubstaff has no supported file path.
- Are Hubstaff scheduled reports available on every plan?
- No. Scheduled reports are available on Grow plans and up, and are limited to three on Grow. Team and Enterprise plans have no limit on the number of scheduled reports.
Leaving is easier than arriving
Getting data out of Hubstaff is a solved problem. Pick the timesheet view, choose expanded CSV if a spreadsheet is the destination, and handle the UTF-8 encoding on the way into Excel. Nothing is gated behind a plan except the automation.
Getting data in is the open question, and it is worth deciding early rather than discovering later. If you are switching to Hubstaff, assume your history stays behind. If you are switching away, check whether the destination reads your account directly, because that avoids both the encoding step and the column mapping that every file route in this category requires.