Harvest

I learned about Harvest through the integration with Asana. Although my team doesn't use it for billable time, we do track hours for projects so that we can understand what portions of our product pipeline are consuming the most time, so we're utilizing just one small portion of the overall functionality, which includes different clients, rates, and other features consultants or freelancers would need. That said, what I like the most is the slick integration with Asana right in the app, and the clean clear reporting in the Harvest tool itself. We don't tend to use the mobile app our our usage, but it seems quite good as well.

The biggest drawback about Harvest is the price for what you get. For a product that does basically one thing, it costs about as much as the Google office suite. The hardest part is that they added a new forecasting tool as a separate product and then that costs an additional monthly fee per user, so instead of extending the capabilities of Harvest itself and giving you more value for your money, they froze the Harvest feature and decided to charge more (fortunately it's an opt-in instead of just raising the prices for all).

I started my marketing agency in 1999. I used manual, paper solutions for time tracking for the first few years. After much research we found Workamajig in 2004 to switch to an online solution. It served its purpose for many years but everyone struggled with it and found it not user friendly at all. After many attempts we found Harvest in 2018. I played with it for a few days at the end of a month then ripped the bandaid and switched to it on the 1st of a month. It was SO user-friendly everyone loved it out the gate and we have never looked back. It's so great for time tracking and quick insight into projects and budget status at the client, project and task level. I love it!

It's very hard to complain about Harvest. I really love it. I do wish it had the ability to set budgets for staff by clients/projects so we can see how booked up our team is and better manage their time allocation. There is a second-party project Harvest syncs with to try to do this, but it does not work the way we needed it to so we dropped it after a brief trial.

Working in a creative field, I am a person who detests tracking time and invoicing. It takes me out of flow and into a space that doesn't really foster creative ideas or spark the imagination. Harvest makes the process about as painless as possible (let's be real, tracking time will never be entirely painless) and frees me up to focus on what I do and how I best deliver value to my clients and team. For clients that prefer to pay by credit card, it allows you to deliver the invoice via a web portal with the ability to pay via PayPal with your cc.

I still feel that the project setup scenarios could be simplified and / or streamlined. I've used Harvest for over 10 years and they have consistently added features and addressed certain gray areas that the software couldn't really account for, but I do think that if they were rebuilding the platform knowing what they know now, they would make it even more straightforward and simple from that standpoint.