Empowering Small Businesses on the Web

Har­vest is an online time track­ing and billing appli­ca­tion. See­ing as I am look­ing at these things all the time, and am very picky, I thought I’d write a short review. More of a “shout out,” really.

Har­vest Time Track­ing Page

Har­vest is designed on the keep-it-simple model: Have just the fea­tures you need, when you need them, and noth­ing else. It is designed for inde­pen­dent pro­fes­sion­als, or teams, and is priced very reasonably.

For a sin­gle user—an inde­pen­dent con­sul­tant, say—it’s only $12 a month. You can add 2 addi­tional users for $10 each per month (let’s say you wanted to have a cou­ple of sub­con­trac­tors help­ing you out.)

For a team of up to 5, it’s $40 a month.

Design­ing an appli­ca­tion that is both sim­ple, and does what you want it to, is no small task. Ask any­one who’s tried to design good soft­ware: It’s a lot eas­ier to make some­thing that you throw the kitchen sink into, than it is to make some­thing that has just the func­tions you want, and noth­ing else. And yet, that is what makes an appli­ca­tion the eas­i­est to use. No extra­ne­ous details.

Har­vest lets you track the time you have spent on any num­ber of clients and projects. It lets you set project bud­gets by time, or money. This is one of my favorite features—because what this lets you do, is see how much time  you have used up on a project, in a lit­tle visual read­out, like so:

Visual Project Readout

In the exam­ple above, I am over my project bud­get by over 3 and a half hours. Not good! But I love to be able to see this sort of thing, at a glance.

What is also won­der­ful about Har­vest, is that it does invoic­ing. Its invoic­ing fea­tures are excel­lent: Sim­ple, and nat­ural. Just click a few but­tons, and it sends out a very atr­rac­tive invoice. It will send an email to the client, help you keep track of who’s paid and who hasn’t, and also tell you which invoices are overdue.

It also does recur­ring invoicing—either auto­mat­i­cally send­ing out a new invoice, or remind­ing you about it, so that you can send it out yourself.

Again, it does all this very intu­itively and nat­u­rally, in my opinion—without a lot of extra­ne­ous bells and whis­tles, but doing every­thing you’d actu­ally need it to do. And again, this is not an easy job!

Major kudos to Har­vest for mak­ing a great app. In the past month and a half since I switched to it, I am just lov­ing using it.