Tracking time with Projector and Harvest
I’m horrible at tracking the time I spend on projects. Up until recently, I’d be scratching my head at the end of the day trying to put together descriptions to correlate to my time logs.
Since we first broke ground on Projector, one of our goals was to make the experience of tracking time as simple as starting and stopping project tasks. Today we’re proud to announce that this is no longer a dream.
Linking Projector with your Harvest account is a breeze, for both you and your entire team. The first step (getting your Harvest OAuth identifier into Projector) is somewhat lengthy, but after that it’s just a few seconds to link future developers and projects to Harvest.
Log in to Harvest, select the ‘Manage’ tab, and click ‘Account Settings’. Scroll down to the ‘3rd Party Integration’ section and click ‘Edit Authentication Tokens’.
Your administrator will need to create an OAuth token for Projector. Click ‘Add Token’ and put in ‘Projector’ as the name, and ‘http://.projectorpm.com’ as the Redirect URI. The website field doesn’t really matter, but feel free to put in our website.
Finally, after creating your token copy the ‘Identifier’ in the right sidebar. This is your Client ID that will allow Projector to request a token on your behalf.
Log into Projector and select ‘Account’ and then the ‘Integration’ tab. Choose ‘Harvest’ and paste the identifier into the text field that appears. Click ‘Update’ - you’ll now see an authorization screen from Harvest asking if you want to give Projector permission to access your Harvest account. Click ‘Approve’.
You’re almost there! For each project that you want to have Projector synchronize with Harvest, go to your project settings (click the gear icon in the left sidebar) and choose the corresponding Harvest project. Harvest also requires that a task be used for any logged time, so select the appropriate task for your project.
Once you save your project settings, anytime you start a task we’ll create a running timer in Harvest with the description set to your task name. Stopping a task stops the timer. It’s that easy.
If you’re a Harvest user, you can track all the time you spent developing a project automatically with Harvest. Come invoice time, it’s as simple as generating an invoice from the hours you’ve logged within Projector.
