Harvest

"Invoicing made easy"

Comentarios: We started using Harvest years ago with my previous company and it was our go-to solution with our new company. No questions asked. It just works and that is why I would recommend it to everyone looking for a simple solution.

Puntos a favor: It just works. Creating an offer, turning it into an invoice, setting everything up... it just works easy. In contrast with many software you can use for invoicing, Harvest doesn't try to do it all, it just keeps things simple. Probably too simple at times, but I never ran into any issues as we have straightforward product & services lines to add to our invoices.

Contras: The fact that the time tracking is included and cannot be ignored as easily as the optional planning tool (that they sell separately) was a small frustration at first. Afterwards, I just tended to directly surf to the Invoices overview and avoid the timetracking part all together. For some it is probably thé selling feature as time tracking looks very easy, but our company doens't keep track of detailed time tracking so we never used that part thoroughly.

"Great for time and billing; hard to integrate with accounting"

Comentarios: Ease of timekeeping and billing has improved. Integration with the rest of my accounting system has become harder.

Puntos a favor: I started using it because I did not find the timekeeping functions of Quickbooks easy enough to use. On that point, Harvest is much better--it is excellent at keeping track of time. In addition, Harvest makes it quite easy to bill clients for time and to follow up with repeated billings if needed.

Contras: I'll mention two things. First, the method of dealing with retainers needs some serious work to be useful for lawyers. If I have an outstanding invoice and a client sends me a retainer, I cannot have payment toward the invoice taken out of the retainer without a fairly convoluted process. Second, it is hard to integrate with Quickbooks. I need Quickbooks (or I suppose, something similar) to keep track of all my financial records. But when I am using Harvest for timekeeping and billing, I wind up making many of the entries twice.

"Great software for the administrator, lacking some functionality for the users"

Puntos a favor: This is great for ease of use and for keeping time tracking central. Although the UI needs work, the UX is very good and makes a cumbersome, laborious task such as time tracking easy and quick. Whereas in other softwares you have to go hunt for the task to track and find the project listing, go to the card, then track - Harvest just has these options all in one panel. For admins, the info collected is quantified in a very visual and excellent way allowing us to track time and project expenses.

Contras: For those not assigned as administrators, you can't see the time estimates for tasks - only projects. This is a massive issue as it means that for one project, I don't know as a designer how much time is allowed for design vs development - only the whole project. As a contractor I work for as a separate client, they also use harvest. I bill at the end of projects and also based on monthly enhancements based on hourly cost. It is extremely hard as a user (not admin) to see and get a summary of this time without having to manually add it all up. Massive issue

"I don't admin Harvest. I only enter time into Harvest. I don't like Harvest."

Comentarios: I personally get no benefits from this software. I'm not a fan.

Puntos a favor: So overall I'm not a fan. That said, documenting expenses is the best I've ever seen in Harvest. It's really well done and simple. Nice and clean, get your photos, get your monies and go. Big fan. That is where my love affair ends with this app. From an administrative point, maybe there are incredible advantages over other offerings. The world may have never experienced such a revolutionary piece of software and I, in turn, am a simpleton; stuck in a world of misunderstanding.

Contras: If you write a app which tracks hourly time and tries to put it into buckets for easy expensing, the time-tracking app should be simple for the multitude of non-admin users. Simply put, it's cumbersome and annoying.... and I say that because someone is going to take stronger language less seriously. Forget the fact that you have to enter in time _Daily_. When I say daily, I don't mean that you click on the day, you do the thing and save. I mean that it shows you one day per page at a time. No calendar to quickly go through a week, no monthly review where you can quickly fill in gaps. One page == one day. You can bring stuff over from the last-entered day, but the hours aren't filled in... just the buckets. This leads to an incredibly slow, painful, and frankly uninteresting experience. For a bunch of users who want to do their job instead of fiddling around with tracking how long they've done their job, asking them to use Harvest is basically asking them to make none of their time billable unless threatened with homelessness. It's incredibly painful to use. To be sure, I'm not a fan of time-tracking apps anyway. I akin them to asking your employees to lie to you and giving them a form in which to do it... but Harvest makes the fun of lying to your employer the low-light of your day. It's not fair.

"Easy, no frills time tracker"

Comentarios: I used Harvest to log billable hours as a freelance design consultant being contracted by a company to participate in a project for about 6 weeks. Very easy to use, really liked being able to log my hours retroactively and getting to export a detailed report of the project logs.

Puntos a favor: It was very easy to use, zero learning curve. I like how you can input time in several ways (either retroactively or start a timer to track time as your doing the task)

Contras: There is nothing I can really say I did not like about this software. Although I was a user, logging time on someone else's account, so I have no idea of the cost of implementing it.