Quick Harvest Time Tracking Review

Aug 4, 2009 by Richard
3 Comments

Quick Harvest Time Tracking Review

We recently started using Harvest as a time tracking tool. For the last few years we have been using QuickBooks Online to track time. It’s an easy enough app to use but the fact that it doesn’t support Mac’s was a real pain. We’re a Mac only shop now (we have had a split of PC’s and Mac’s in the past) so the general frustration levels were now universal. We decided to keep QuickBooks for all our financial reporting and bookkeeping but we needed a better way to understand project profitability and progress.

We researched several similar tools but picked Harvest for a few specific reasons:

It integrates with Basecamp
There is a desktop widget for Mac’s and PC’s that allows quick time adding
The progress bars show you how far along a project is.

The progress bar was the highlight for me. As the guy who needs to know what projects are at what stage so I can either bill a client or discuss scope creep before it’s too late. Although we only charge fees on design and SEO projects we still track time to measure progress, profitability and track billing cycles.

3 Responses to “Quick Harvest Time Tracking Review”

John Gallagher

March 10, 2010 at 8:48 pm

I'm totally in love with Harvest. It's awesome.

I'm making a time tracker without timers called Lapsus. Initially, I'm targeting it at Ruby on Rails developers, but long term, it will be available for web designers, graphic designers etc. If you're interested in finding out more, you can sign up to the Beta at http://lapsusapp.co.uk

Long term it will be able to send time data to various web apps and Harvest is high on my list to integrate with.

Thanks for reading. I'd love to hear your thoughts on such an application!

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freshtilledsoil

March 10, 2010 at 10:58 pm

Hi John,

Just checked out the video on your site describing Lapsus and it looked really cool. A nice approach to time tracking without having to be too mindful of specific tasks. We'd definitely like to give it a try when it can synch up with Harvest. Cheers.

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Alena

August 20, 2010 at 2:25 pm

Have you ever tried Tempo? It also integrates with Basecamp and has a widget. You can also input time via email. I’ve been using it for a year and my favorite part is the reports it generates because it makes me look extra professional to my clients.

If you’re interested in checking it out, here’s the website http://zetetic.net/c/tempo-forum

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