I’m really excited to be writing this blog post! In support, one of the common feature requests we get is for a Harvest client log in: a place where you can direct your clients to go to view their invoices and any uninvoiced time on their projects.
One our our customers, Jeroen Kenters of Jeroen Kenters Web Development has taken the time to build just that using PHP (no database required!) and the Harvest API, and he’s made it open source – so you’re free to install it and tweak it however you like. Harvest4Clients is dead simple to configure and use. Instead of having me go on and on about it though, why not check out a demo?
Great news! Harvest now integrates with inDinero, an online accounting solution for small businesses. inDinero makes it easy for businesses to track their finances and understand their money. By downloading data across financial accounts, inDinero produces the vital information of any business – where money is going, where money is coming from, and how much money is on hand.
With inDinero, business owners have a real time financial dashboard without the daily manual entry. No more shoeboxes; no more spreadsheets.
When you link your Harvest account to inDinero, inDinero will pull all invoices you have entered as well as all expenses in any projects. Every time you login to inDinero, your Harvest information will be updated automatically. You can link Harvest with your inDinero account by choosing Harvest from the “Web Apps” section. If your business isn’t on inDinero yet, you can signup for an inDinero account, and get started on tracking your finances easily today.
Developers: Want to build your own integrations to Harvest? Check out the Harvest API!
Base (formerly PipeJump) is a small business CRM software package for managing contacts and sales. They recently launched an integration with Harvest, allowing project creation from your “won” deals. With this integration, managing the flow from contact to sales to tracking your project in Harvest is seamless.
See the integration in action, thanks to this screencast provided by Base:
Don’t forget, integrations with Harvest are just an API call away. Do let us know if you are planning an integration, or even if you are just dreaming of one!
Update:We’re excited to announce that the latest version of our Harvest iPhone app, v1.4, has been released. This version includes a bug fix for syncing expense receipts, and will also backup your receipt photos to your iPhone. You can find it in the App Store on your iPhone.
Today we’re announcing a significant update for our Free official Harvest iPhone app, version 1.3. You can find it in the App Store on your iPhone.
Improved Syncing Reliability
Version 1.3 brings improved reliability with the iPhone syncing to your online Harvest account. Being one of the first to bring offline syncing to time tracking, we’ve now made it even better. The previous code ran into a number of issues during sync, so we decided to overhaul the entire syncing engine. This overhaul includes the removal of 1000+ lines on code in favor of a brand new set of API calls for much more efficient and reliable syncing (these calls will soon be exposed to all API developers and integrations).
Tracking time and expenses on-the-go should be smoother than ever. As an added bonus, the new API calls now allow us to include conflict messages when a sync doesn’t work exactly as planned, so you know exactly what happened:
Other Features
Along with the reliability updates, this version also includes some new features and other improvements, including:
You can now create clients, projects, and tasks right from the app
A ‘Jump to Today’ button if you go to another day in Timesheets
A ‘Jump to this Week’ button if you go to another week in Expenses
Project Codes are now displayed
Increased font sizes on all inputs
Various bug fixes
New icon
Enjoy, and let us know how the Harvest iPhone app is helping your business. As always, let us know how we can make it even better.
The Harvest iPhone app allows iPhone users (with iOS 4) to track time and expenses on-the-go, with or without a network connection. You can start and stop task timers, add duration and notes, and upload expense receipts right from your iPhone. Learn more about iPhone Time Tracking.
Good news for Quickbooks Online and Harvest users! You can now sync Quickbooks Online with Harvest using Syncr. The connector will sync your timesheets, invoices, clients, people, and projects data between Harvest and your Quickbooks Online account.
If there are duplicate entries between Quickbooks and Harvest, you’ll be notified. You can even set the sync to occur at a given frequency (i.e daily, monthly). The connector is built by a third-party company called Mutually Human and costs $20/month. Learn more at Syncr HQ.
Using Quickbooks for Windows? You can easily export timesheets from Harvest into Quickbooks for Windows from within your Harvest account. For more information visit our Help Center.
Mobile devices have come a long way since their heyday as a voice communication device. Beyond helping us connect with friends and family, the smartphone has become a powerful business tool in the palm of our hands.
After we released Harvest for iPhone last year, it came as no surprise that one of the most frequent requests from customers has been for us to create a mobile app for Android. We’ve been paying close attention to the adoption of Android amongst our users and late last year decided that having a great mobile companion for Android was simply too important to not address. We needed to provide the best and most convenient way for our users to access Harvest on the emerging smartphone platform.
With the release of the official Harvest Android time tracker app, Android users can now enjoy the same powerful features available to iPhone users: start and stop timers on the go, enter expenses, and snap photos of receipts to securely send them to your Harvest account.
Now whether the members on your team have iPhones or Android devices, everyone will have access to the important mobile-centric things they might need to do while on the go.
Mobile phones will continue to rapidly evolve in form and function even over the next few months. We are committed to bringing you the best experience with Harvest, especially as the times are a changin’.
Visit Android time tracker to learn more and download this companion app for free.
BONUS: Have a Windows Phone 7? Check out the soon-to-be-released 3rd party app, TimeTractor: Windows Phone 7 Time Tracker
A smattering of developers (who are also Harvest customers!) have released some cool integrations in the past few months, and we thought we’d share the highlights with you.
Post GitHub Commits to Co-op
Robert May of Core Web Design has put together an integration between GitHub and Co-op, Harvest’s team communication application. This GitHub service posts GitHub commits from any project of your choosing directly to Co-op. It’s a fantastic way to keep your team up-to-date on the latest development activity.
To set up the integration, visit the source GitHub repository and go to Admin > Service Hooks. Choose Co-op and fill in the necessary information.
activeCollab is a popular project management & collaboration tool that you can set up on your own server or local network. Thanks to developer (and Harvest customer) Andreas Schempp, activeCollab users can now install a module which allows for time that is tracked in activeCollab to easily be submitted to Harvest.
Like Basecamp, time tracked with activeCollab is toward specific to-dos — making it difficult to run reports and generate an invoice with the time you’ve tracked. This module helps you convert those specific to-dos into higher level tasks in Harvest (where generating invoices and reports is a breeze). Here’s a quick demo video that shows how the Harvest & activeCollab integration works:
Yesterday, PayPal introduced a new product called PayPal Business Payments, and Harvest is proud to be a launch partner for this new product. This is a new, fast and secure method for sending and receiving payments for the lowest possible rate out there: a flat 50 cent fee. Harvest customers can take advantage of this new pricing for their account now.
Just 50 Cents?
The most compelling reason to use Business Payments is that you will now pay only a flat $0.50 per transaction for the payments you collect with PayPal. As a small business charging hundreds or thousands of dollars per invoice, a flat transaction fee to collect payment online is a welcome change from fees that usually take a percentage of the payment. This simple pricing ensures that you keep most of your invoiced amount while paying a truly small amount to PayPal in the process. For example, it doesn’t matter if your invoice is $900 or $9000, your fee to PayPal will still be just only a flat $0.50.
Note: Business Payments require the sender of the payment (your clients) to have a PayPal account and have their account linked to their bank account. Also, PayPal Business Payments is currently only available for US customers receiving payments domestically.
How To Activate
Just head over to your Invoices > Configure > Online Payments section and select the new Business Payments option now available for PayPal. That’s all there is to it! Give it a try and let us know what you think.
This wraps up our series on Getting You Paid Faster. If you missed our other features, you can read about our other new features that get you paid twice as fast via web invoicing.
Harvest users can now take advantage of AkaCRM’s integration with Salesforce, available for free through their site.
Here’s how it works: Using Harvest2Salesforce Connector, add projects in Salesforce the same way you add projects in Harvest. After adding the project in both applications, you can track time as usual in Harvest under that project.
When you sync the Salesforce application with Harvest, your team’s time entries will now appear under the appropriate project in Salesforce. Additionally you can view reporting figures, like invoiced and uninvoiced hours, and your project’s budget within Salesforce.
Published January 12th, 2012 by Jonathan Lane 
