Connecting a source

Harvest

If you already track billable hours in Harvest, this is the shortest route in: the hours are recorded, and nothing about how you work has to change. Toiling Away reads the entries you have already stopped and turns them into toil.

New here? Toiling Away turns recorded time into animals that live in a habitat of your own.

Get an API key

  1. In Harvest, create a personal access token from your Harvest ID account, under developer tools.
  2. Copy it before you close the window. Harvest shows a token once and will not show it again. If you lose it, create another.
  3. In Toiling Away, open Connections -> add Harvest, and paste the token in. It is checked immediately, so a bad key fails there and then rather than quietly never syncing.

One token covers one Harvest account. A token that can see several accounts is refused rather than guessed from, so if you work across accounts, use a token that belongs to exactly one.

What gets counted

Your own time entries, and only yours. Every request is filtered to the person the token belongs to, so an administrator cannot earn from the rest of the agency's hours. What you were working on is not stored.

An hour is ten toil.

It thinks in days

Harvest reports a date and decimal hours per entry, with start and end times only on some accounts. Rather than invent where in the day a duration-only entry happened, we ask what each day comes to and credit the increase since the last look.

That has two visible consequences. Toil is credited when it is noticed rather than when you worked, so it arrives in steps at a sync rather than the moment you stop a timer. And each sync re-reads the last thirty days, because entries get edited at invoicing time; correcting an entry in Harvest corrects it here too rather than leaving the first version behind.

A day means a Harvest day. Where Harvest tells us which timezone your account keeps, we follow it, and where it does not we fall back to UTC.

If it stops working

The Connections screen shows the reason Harvest gave. The usual cause is a token that has been replaced or revoked. Create a new one, paste it in, and it carries on from where it stopped without re-crediting the days it has already counted.