Harvest prevents you from taking certain actions when a timer is running. This gives you the opportunity to correct timers that are running by mistake and prevents accidents like invoicing or archiving a project that someone is currently tracking time to.

You won’t be able to do the following if an associated timer is running:

• Invoice for the project and time period that includes the running timer. 
• Submit a timesheet for approval.
• Approve a timesheet (if a timer was started after the timesheet was submitted).
  • In Time > Pending approval, clicking Approve all timesheets will approve only projects without running timers.
• Archive a project, person, or task.

When you attempt any of those actions, you’ll see a warning with a clickable date that takes you back to the timesheet entry in question. The timesheet owner, an Administrator, or a Manager with the optional permission to Create and edit time and expenses for people and projects they manage will need to stop the running timer before proceeding. Administrators and Managers (with edit permissions) can learn how to do that from How to view or edit another person's timesheet.

Managers without permission to Create and edit time and expenses for people and projects they manage can’t stop another person’s timer; instead, they can notify a person about a running timer via the Send user email link found on all timesheets in Time > Pending approval for submitted timesheets.

Running timers and recurring invoices

If a timer is running for a project included on a recurring invoice template at the time the invoice is set to be generated, we won't be able to generate the invoice. In this instance, we'll email all Administrators in the account to let them know that the invoice failed to be generated. This email will include a link to stop the timers. 

Once the timers have been stopped, if you'd like an invoice to be generated before the next date in the recurring invoice template sequence, you'll need to manually generate a single invoice from Invoices > Overview.