We are pretty active on Twitter. It’s a great way to get quick messages out as we release new features. We love to hear what you have to say about Harvest, good or bad.

It would not be particularly efficient for everyone on the team to watch the flow of tweets about Harvest. So, for those of us who have the task of watching Twitter, we like to favorite interesting tweets about Harvest, and we also like to share them with the rest of the team. This is a perfect task for automation by Cobot, your friendly Co-op robot.

We created a Ruby script that runs every 30 minutes looking for the latest favorited tweets on our Harvest Twitter account. It also looks at the Harvest stream to pull in anything we’ve said on Twitter. These tweets get inserted into our Co-op stream and provide a nice bit of motivation from our wonderful customers.

If you are curious to see the script, it can be found on GitHub. And here it is in action:

Enjoy using Cobot to enhance your Co-op workstreams, we’re excited to know if you find this feature useful!

Today, we’re excited to announce the arrival of our official Harvest iPhone app to the iTunes App Store.

Harvest for your iPhone allows you to track time and expenses on-the-go, with or without a network connection. Start and stop the task timers or enter durations with notes while you’re on the road.

Need to submit receipts with your expenses? With Harvest for your iPhone, you can snap photos of your receipts and attach them to your expense entries in Harvest. It’s a great way to stay organized.

Hat tip to CrazedCoders (the creators of the Co-op iPhone companion, iCo-op) for helping us launch this app. Enjoy and let us know what you think!

We’ve decided to start a tradition of monthly potluck lunches here at Harvest HQ, and yesterday, everyone really stepped up their game.  The potluck lunch is a great way for everyone at the HQ and our friends to enjoy each others company, and show off some surprising culinary skills.

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This month’s New Founder says he is happier working on cars and motorcycles in garages and fields than he ever was in his 15 years of working in an office as a graphic designer.  Jesper Bram established his Kustom Graphics business in June 2009, and we got to talk with him about what exactly pinstriping is, going with the Arctic Pinheads to the Hot Rod Rock show in Finland, and why time tracking in Harvest is an integral part of his day-to-day business.

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You can no doubt tell that Harvest takes our responsibility of hosting our customers’ data very seriously from the recent “behind the scenes” posts on maintenance and service availability. Yesterday we discovered a bug in the database software we use, which can cause intermittent speed problems for parts of the site. Harvest has been built to be fast, and we love how frequently Harvest users remark on the responsiveness of the application. We initially planned to upgrade this database software as part of the upcoming infrastructure upgrade but we have decided to bring the upgraded database software to Harvest sooner rather than later.

At 1 am EST on Thursday 18th (what time is that for you?) we’ll briefly take Harvest offline for 30 minutes to upgrade the database software.

Thanks for your support, it’s much appreciated.

The Harvest Team communicates with Co-op all day, every day. It is the visual heartbeat of our team, as we share failures, successes and silliness from our work days and our lives. While this heartbeat is strong, it also has an obvious arrhythmia: no system status messages.

For the past couple weeks we have been refining an API technique to programmatically add system status, and anything else, to a Co-op workstream. We are pleased with the results, and would like to introduce you to Cobot:

Cobot posts may be created via the Co-op API.

Along for the ride are a couple of new formatting features now enabled for Co-op statuses. First, statuses now accept <br /> tags to force new lines, which is essential for posting things like deployment of multiple code commits.

Co-op also now supports code pastes. If you paste anything in your Co-op message box with two or more new lines, the code paste view will take effect:

Feel free to share what kinds of system messages you will be looking to bring into your Co-op workstreams, we’re excited to know if you find this feature useful!

We are really sorry for the issue earlier today (February 16th)! Some users may have found parts of Harvest were running slow earlier this morning, and once we isolated the cause of the issue we needed to take Harvest offline temporarily to fix a problem we detected.

Around 10:15 am EST we started to see some suspiciously high server load on our database servers. We received some reports from users that reporting functions in Harvest were very slow. We narrowed the problem down to a specific bug in the database software we use which was causing reporting queries to run very slowly. We took Harvest offline briefly to disable reporting and restore all other functionality. Between 10:45am and 11:00am EST the site was in maintenance mode as we disabled reporting. Between 11:00am and 12:00pm EST we were able to isolate and repair the speed issues with the reporting functionality and reports came back online at 12:00pm.

Nobody likes seeing Harvest slow (or unavailable) less than we do! We have already planned an infrastructure upgrade over the coming weekend and part of this upgrade involves upgrading the database software which was running slow earlier today.

Thank you for your support and understanding as we continually improve Harvest. And thank you to all of the Harvest users who follow @harvest on Twitter and provide your feedback to our team in real time.

We just released another small, but useful feature on your timesheet. On the Day View, after you click on “Edit” for a time entry, you’ll see a link “Change Date” on the lower right corner:

Click on it and you’ll see a date field for you to move the entry to another date.

Hope you find this new feature useful, and let us know if you have any questions for feedback.

FEB 25th UPDATE: We’ve made some further improvements to the Harvest systems setup and we will now be doing this server migration on Sunday, Feb 28 2am – 5am EST (what time is that for you?). We’ll keep you posted on the progress.

We have been working on a new systems platform for Harvest and Co-op recently, with the main objective being a manageable growth platform for the future. Part of this new systems setup involves moving our applications over to a new set of servers. In order to make the move, we need to perform systems maintenance to route data and traffic over to the new setup. We will be taking Harvest and Co-op offline between 2am – 5am EST on Sunday February 21st (see above update for new time) to perform this server migration.

As always, we thank you for your patience and support!

Follow @harvest on Twitter to receive updates on Harvest status, and general Harvest news in real time.

Harvest has many customers from around the world. And for some of you who run a business not based in the U.S., it used to be a pain to run yearly reports, because your fiscal year does not start in January. I’m happy to report that we have just released a feature to customize the fiscal year, which should save you a lot of time when running reports.

To configure the fiscal year, just go to Manage > Account Settings, and click on the Edit Preferences button. Under the setting titled “Fiscal year” you may choose the starting month for the fiscal year that makes sense for you.  For example, if your company is based in Australia, you would most likely select “July” here.

Once you set up the fiscal year, you will notice “This fiscal year” option under the “Change Timeframe” dropdown on all reports. In addition, the “Payments Received Year-to-Date” section of your Account Overview will be calculated using your custom fiscal year.

Also note that on the Edit Preferences page (under Account Settings), you can also customize format for date, time and numbers to fit your preferences.

Thank you all for your suggestions and support. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback!