Budget & team

See Harvest budget against delivery progress

Budget lives in Harvest. Delivery lives in your tracker. That is why a project reaches 94% spent and nobody on the delivery team saw it coming. Connect Harvest and Spectr keeps a read-only copy next to the work: hours and cost, budgeted against spent against remaining, plus a Budget page covering every project. You cannot edit budget in Spectr - Harvest stays the source of truth.

How it connects

Personal Access Token plus your Harvest Account ID. Both are validated against Harvest before anything is saved.

Before you start

The budget endpoints require a Harvest Administrator or Manager account. A member-level token connects and can pick a project, but Harvest returns a permission error on the budget itself.

What Spectr reads from Harvest

Budget and spend for one project: Budget configuration and Harvest's own precomputed budget report - so the numbers Spectr shows are the numbers Harvest shows, not a re-derivation that can disagree.
Project metadata: Code, notes, start and end dates, fixed-fee and billable flags - shown in the project budget drawer alongside the donut and progress bar.
Logged hours per team member: Per-member logged time, shown on the Budget page's Team tab beside scheduled allocation from Forecast when that is also connected.

A person approves everything before it is published

Spectr generates specs and stories, then stops. Every story goes to a review page where you approve it, edit it inline, or reject it - individually or in bulk. Only approved stories reach an issue tracker. There is no auto-publish setting to switch on, because a backlog nobody read is not a saving.

Setting it up

In Harvest, create a Personal Access Token and note your Account ID.
In Spectr, open the project, go to Integrations, choose Harvest, and enter both.
Pick the Harvest project this Spectr project maps to. Budget tracking is one-to-one.
Spectr runs an initial sync. Open the Budget drawer on the project, or the workspace Budget page for every project at once.

Frequently asked questions

Can everyone on my team see the money figures?

No. Reads are split by role: any member sees health percentage and hours budgeted, spent and left; only admins see money, rates, notes and fees.

Can I edit a budget in Spectr?

No, by design. Harvest owns the budget. Spectr keeps a read-only snapshot, and a failed sync never overwrites the last good numbers - it shows when the sync last succeeded and why the latest attempt did not.