Overview

Have you ever noticed that your Actuals in Parallax appear inflated over Harvest?  If so, you might have fallen victim to a sneaky nuance to the way Harvest records Actuals.

How can Negative Actuals happen in Harvest?

In short, it comes down to the way Actuals are edited after being entered.

Within Harvest's Time page, there are two separate Views:

• Week (default) - Lets you view and edit all days of the week in one view.
• Day - Lets you drill down and add multiple entries per Project.

Most workers tend to use Day view to enter their Hours, meaning their total Hours for a day may include multiple Entries per Project.  However, most supervisors tend to work in Week view, making updates as needed.

This problem happens when you edit Hours for a Project in Week View, that is actually several separate Entries entered in Day View - Harvest doesn't know which Entry to change, so it adds a Actuals in a negative amount to reach the desired amount*.  As a practice, Parallax does not absorb negative Actuals, leading to a difference in totals.

Parallax Tip - Here's a concrete example:

Worker 1 is assigned to Project A.  On Tuesday, Worker 1 first adds 1 Hour, then later adds 1 more Hour.  So far, this looks like:

Day: 1h + 1h = 2h

Week: 2h

Parallax: 2h

Later, a Supervisor visits Week view in Harvest and removes 1 Hour.  Now, this looks like:

Day: 1h + 1h - 1h = 1h

Week: 1h

Parallax 1h + 1h = 2h

How do I fix them?

Confirming and fixing negative Actuals in Harvest is easy - just visit the Day on which the Actuals don't match, and make sure you're in Day view.  Here, you'll see a list of entries for each Project.  Simply find remove both the negative entry and any edit or replace a single Entry to the desired amount. 

Parallax Tip - Here's a concrete example:

Supervisor 1 visits Time in Harvest and selects Day view.  Supervisor 1 then navigates to Tuesday and sees the following entries:

Project 1: 1h 

Project 1: 1h

Project 1: -1h

Supervisor 1 removes the -1h Entry and one of the 1h Entries.  Now it looks like:

Project 1: 1h

How do I avoid them?

One trick we've found is to zero-out entries when making edits in Week view.  If you zero-out an old number before adding a new one, Harvest doesn't have to decide which Day view Entries to edit - it can just clear them all away.  You can then enter the desired number from a clean slate.

Alternately, both the initial entry and edits can be made from the same view.  For example if you want your workers using Day view to add Hours, then both workers and supervisors will want to make any further edits in Day view.