Harvest was recommended by one of RealEyes’ own developers, the Code Cook himself, John Crosby.  I like John and all, but am even more excited to try out the application after reading that one of my favorite interactive agencies, Big Spaceship, uses it, too.  Earth to Big Spaceship: if you’re out there, how do you like Harvest after using it for awhile?

Product Information

Harvest is a subscription-based time tracking application with clients for many platforms including desktop, web, and mobile.  After logging in to the web application, a dashboard view gives users a nice, high-level view of the current time logs, which might encourage people to log time more frequently if they knew that their boss was so easily checking in on progress.  The navigation seems freakishly intuitive and adaptable - it auto saves for me and remembers my preferences.  Bummer… doesn’t look like there are any resource allocation tools.

Website: http://www.getharvest.com/
Pricing for 10 users:  $90/month = $1080/year

Meeting Our Goals

Using our initial goal list as a reference, Harvest looks like it is a contender.

Harvest allows users easily to:

Bill for time: When setting up a project, it is possible to bill by an employee’s standard rate or a rate per task.  The invoice creation tool is super flexible, and there is integration for QuickBooks built in as well.  I also like that you can create a free-form invoice for clients easily that is not tied to hours worked.

Estimate time: You can estimate against total hours per project or task hours.  Nice feature as we run projects that are Agile, fixed-bid, and everywhere in between.  Reports make it easy to see how we’re performing against estimates, but no weekly burn-down graphs.

Run reports: The reports are very intuitive and pretty, if not wholly flexible and comprehensive.  For example, it seems difficult to run a report for a project that you’re not currently working on if you don’t know any of the project dates.  I would prefer that in addition to the current report interface that there was a dropdown containing all projects (perhaps letting you toggle between current projects and all projects) that would drive you to the overview screen for that project.  It is very easy, however, to drill down on information contained in the reports to glean a lot of information quickly.

Integrate with some other project management application: StandardTime integrates with Basecamp at a high level, in that you can import project names and employees assigned to projects and auto generate accounts for newbies if needed. It doesn’t integrate any of Basecamp’s To-Do lists, milestones, or time tracking data.  It would also be awesome if imported projects had links to the Basecamp URL for users to quickly jump between the two applications.

Write notes about what was done: You can write specific notes for each time entry, and, in the daily time log entry view (even with stop watch), this is a seamless step in the workflow, and very similar to TimeFox.  It requires some drilling to see these in the report view, but they come out in the XLS export nicely.  You can also write notes at a project level.

I sure wish we could:

See how much time was spent doing X or X-type tasks: Tasks are independent of one another and not able to be grouped in folders or designated as part of a category of tasks.  So, if you want to know how much time you spent doing project management related tasks at the end of the year, you’d need to run reports for all projects and make this tabulation manually.

Use it for resource allocation: There isn’t a way to allocate time against resources for the future.  The overall project estimation paradigm that Harvest has is great and would be awesome if this applied by week and project to individual resources.

Running Reports

Harvest is intuitive, but could be lacking for those really curious people who like to customize reports.  For people who want to gain insight into an individual project and are not as interested in cross-project data (for example, how much time total is spent in meetings during a month), Harvest is a real winner with its simple interface and graphical reports.

With the exception of group and subsystem reports, I can generate all of the other reports in my wish list easily, so am pretty happy.  I guess a bit of math could keep my acumen sharp.

Entering Time

This is where Harvest really shines.  There are so many ways to enter time using Harvest that one of them is bound to fit into your workflow.  Additionally, there is an API for Harvest so you can spend the time to create new widgets.

With Harvest you can log time:

• Using a desktop widget - Mac and PC.
• Using a timer.
• Using a form - daily or weekly timesheet.
• From Twitter.
• While outside the network with the database server.
• From a mobile device.
  • From the iPhone
  • Via Text Message

With Harvest you cannot log time:

• While offline.

Integration with Other Tools

Harvest integrates with several other tools already, and can be extended to integrate with others using their API.

Harvest integrates with:

• Project milestone application - Basecamp
• Issue and defect tracking - Zendesk
• Billing - QuickBooks
• Reporting - Does itself
• Project documentation - Basecamp and Does itself

StandardTime does not integrate with:

• SVN
• Resource allocation

Other Considerations?

Use our servers for database hosting or allow for easy export of all time tracking information. Can export reports to XLS easily and can use API to create custom reports if needed.  But, since it’s hosted and no off-line option, if the Harvest servers go down, there is no time tracking.  But, good news that their servers are monitored 24/7.

Allow for new projects to be created easily using template for tasks. Super easy.  At first, I thought that the task rate was assigned in the template and couldn’t be altered per project.  Once I found out that wasn’t the case, I am in love.

Allow for import of past project time tracking data. Nope.  Thumbs down.

Allow for unlimited number of users. Hooray!  With the $90/month option, we can start with the ten that we need and add more with out cost.  Harvest even differentiates between contractors and FTEs in the dashboard reports.

Reasonable cost (per month or one-time). At $90 a month, it’s less than an hour of client work.

Support from company. Harvest has been around for two years and has an impressive list of endorsements.  I called them (no toll free number) and got a real person, right away.  All of this is a good indication of support levels in my book.

Cannot associate tasks to folders/subsystems.  This can be worked around by naming conventions; however, there would be no automatic totaling for project categories.  This is often something that requested by clients and would require hand calculation.

Security for and backup of logged data.  The $90/month plan comes with 128-bit SSL security and data is backed up daily.

Pricing guarantee. There is none offered on the site, and I haven’t called to inquire about this.  Having a price guarantee would be nice because once they have us a customer, we’ll be more locked in to paying whatever rate increases they have just to keep the service.

Got API? Yep!  The Harvest API is based on REST services. You can write data to and read data from the Harvest data store.