Welcome to Expert Tips, a new series written by Harvest Experts, our very own illustrious customer support team. We’ll be sharing some of our favorite tips, tricks, and you-wish-you’d-known-about-it-sooner best practices, ripped right from the headlines of our customer support queue. Subscribe to the blog below to never miss
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Harvest Experts receive new and exciting questions every day. Well, some questions aren’t particularly new, but they are still exciting—because we get to drop some knowledge about our lesser-known features!

Here’s an example of a support request I receive regularly:

“Can I see when my team started and stopped their timers?”

The answer... may surprise you. It’s yes!

Under your account’s preferences, you’re able to choose between two timer modes:

Harvest offers two timer modes: via duration, or via start and end time

Harvest accounts are set to Track time via duration by default, so your team started out (and may still be) creating time entries in the day view like this:

A Harvest time entry dialog that lets you select a project and task, enter notes, and start a timer

You can either start a timer or input your hours, and your timesheet will show the duration of the time you tracked.

Image of a Harvest timesheet with the duration tracked to a timer

But if you’re like our based-on-a-true-story customer above and want to see timestamps, you can actually switch your timer mode to Track time via start and end times.

With that timer mode, creating time entries in the day view will look like this:

A Harvest time entry dialog showing options to enter a project, task, notes, and start and end times

You can start a timer, or you can enter the time you started and stopped working on the task. Either way, your timesheet will show that detail!

A view of a Harvest timesheet showing the start and end times of a timer, in addition to its duration

Ahhh, a classic 9 to 5 workday—and the timestamps to prove it. 😌 

A note: If you choose to track time via start and end times, the Week view of your timesheets will be disabled, since there aren't start and end fields available there. Your team will only be able to track time from the Day view of their timesheets.

How to switch your timer mode

If you’re an Administrator, head over to Settings (top right) and scroll down to click Edit preferences. Next to Timer mode, choose either Track time via duration or Track time via start and end time. Don't forget to hit Save preferences when you're done!
 
This will apply to all timers for all team members moving forward. It won’t apply to previously tracked time. So, if you’ve been tracking via duration but switch to start and end times, keep in mind you won’t see the timestamps for existing time entries—only those tracked after you made the update.
 
Happy timer mode-ing! ⏲️