Connecting with Linear

If you use Linear as a project management tool, you can easily integrate it with Everhour and start tracking time for all your Linear issues. No more tab switching.

How to setup

1

You'll be prompted to connect during signup. To do this, you need to hit 'Linear' button and let Everhour do the rest, step-by-step.

You can connect Linear or any other platform at any time from the Integrations page in your account settings.

2

You need to invite your team to join Everhour. During the registration process, they will need to connect their Linear accounts and install our browser extension. I.e. Only those you invite into Everhour will be able to track time and see time progress. These are not necessarily all Linear users. Same way your clients will not see anything in Linear unless you add them to your Everhour team.

3

You will need to grant access to our extension after it is installed. Click on its icon in the toolbar > Grant Access. Otherwise we won't be able to embed time tracking controls inside Linear interface.

4

Click on the Extensions icon in Chrome, and then on the pin icon next to Everhour to make it visible all the time. This way you can always be aware if your timer is running or not (optional step).

How sync works

Upon integrating with Linear, you will be prompted to choose the specific workspaces you wish to grant Everhour access to. Only the selected workspaces will be involved in the subsequent configuration process.

Once it's done, Everhour syncs all active projects with its issues from a workspace that was connected. Everhour automatically updates the names of connected tasks and projects if they were renamed in Linear  after some time. This way Everhour reports always show the freshest data.

How to trigger instant sync

If you just renamed the existing project and want to see these changes immediately in Everhour, you need to re-sync projects from the Integrations page manually.

1

Here is how to do it for projects.

2

Same with issues. If you've just renamed an issue, added a new tag or moved the task into a different section and you want to see these changes instantly, you need to go to the Projects page, select the project(-s) with a change and hit 'Resync Tasks'.

Controls inside Linear

After successful integration, Everhour supplements Linear interface with a number of features.

1. Header: See total project hours and estimate (click on it to open a project summary);
2. Task: See timer, estimate, and reported time next to the task title, as well as by grouping;
3. Buttons: Track time using the timer or log time manually;
4. Side bar: use our 'Timesheet' button to open timesheet window. You’ll be able to quickly look at all your timekeeping for a Day or Week as well as quickly add time and comments for the tasks you have been working on.

Making reports with Linear data

There are a number of columns that shows specific data coming from Linear. Open a report builder and select any of columns to display the data in your report.

• Workspace shows the name of the workspace where projects are located;
• Section shows the name of a milestone;
• Project and task accordingly show the names of Linear projects and issues; 
• Task number and Task status shows the issue ID and what stage of work it is located in;
• Tag shows tags that you added to a task.

Permissions

In general, we rely on Linear's permissions a lot. If in Linear the user has access to the task project, therefore, he can track the time in it. If you take away someone's access to the project in Linear, this user will no longer be able to track time into its tasks. Past history will remain in the reports of the team, but the user will lose it.

Configuring budgets, marking a task as non-billable, assigning a client to the project can only be done by admins. The admin in Everhour can see projects and tasks of all members. It does not matter if an admin has access to the same project in Linear. This is due to the fact that any admin should see the same totals in time reports and be able to configure projects billing and budgeting.

Regular users cannot track time into the archived project. Admins can do that, but only manually (timer is disabled). Thus, we indicate that the project is archived and make sure that no one tracks time accidentally.

Troubleshooting

It may happen that Linear changes something in their code and these changes break some part of our functionality. We always do our best to apply the necessary corrections ASAP, but this requires updating our browser extension (this is how we embed into Linear interface and there is no other mechanism). If you encounter an issue that something has stopped working, please make sure that you have the latest version of the extension installed. Read this article for more details.

If suddenly the review of our extension is delayed by Google team, as a temporarily workaround, you can install the dev version of our extension. Read this article for more details.

Disconnecting

To disable integration, go to 'Integrations' page in Everhour account. 

This option affects only your account, other team members are still able to track time. If the whole team disconnects Linear, no one can track new time in Linear, time history remains only in admin reports. 

To remove all Everhour controls from Linear interface, delete our browser extension.