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.