Today we’re announcing a significant update for our Free official Harvest Android app, version 1.3. This update brings improved reliability with your Android phone syncing to your online Harvest account.
We launched our Android app in March of this year. This summer we overhauled the entire syncing engine in our iPhone app with brand new API calls, and now we’ve brought these new API calls to our Android app. They are a much more efficient and reliable way to sync time and expenses on your phone, even on-the-go!
Along with the reliability updates, this version also includes some new features and other improvements, including:
Sync button added to Pending tab
Project Codes are now displayed
‘Report Issues’ directly from the options menu
Various bug fixes
New icon
Enjoy, and let us know how the Harvest Android app is working for you. If you’re running into any phone-specific issues, let us know by writing into support.
Visit Android time tracker to learn more and download this companion app for free.
One of our most popular feature requests has been a more flexible user permissions system. Most importantly, administrators needed the ability to give project managers more control over their projects. We’re excited to announce that we’ve made this possible – administrators can now choose which project managers can create projects, view rates, or generate invoices for projects they manage.
Customizing User Permissions
There are three different roles that can be assigned under Manage > People:
Regular User – Mark someone as a regular user if they need to track time and expenses and view reports on their own activity.
Project Manager – PMs can see and approve time for projects they oversee, and they can view reports on those projects. Additionally, there are three optional permissions:
Create projects – Allows PMs to create projects for all clients on the account.
View rates – Shows rates to PMs for all projects they manage.
Create invoices – Enables PMs to create invoices only for projects they manage. A project manager can view and edit an invoice until it’s sent by an administrator (only administrators can send invoices or record payments for them).
Administrators – If someone needs access to all time, projects, and reports in your account, this role is for them.
Roles are displayed next to everyone’s names in Manage > People, so permissions are both flexible and easy to track. We hope the new user permissions result in a more shared and streamlined workflow across your team!
Update:We’ve now added a Snail-mail Friendly option to move the client address to the left for the envelope window. You can find this option, hide columns, and company logo in a new Appearance tab on the Invoices and Estimates configure pages.
Today we’re announcing a significant upgrade to our invoicing and estimate platforms: a new rendering engine for the PDFs you send to your clients.
The new engine, which is built with wkhtmltopdf and Liquid-based templates, renders PDFs based on HTML and CSS. This is really exciting, because it allows us to use more flexible and simple code to create them. This means we can have the exact same code for invoice and estimate PDFs as we have in the app, which means they now have the same design and options.
What’s New
Implementing this allowed us to make some other features available on Invoices and Estimates:
PDFs now have the page number at the bottom (and an option to translate).
You can now hide the type, quantity, and/or unit prices columns.
If you have a company logo uploaded, but still want your invoice to say “Invoice” on the page, you now have this option. You can turn it on where you uploaded your company logo in the configure section, and then change the title in translations (i.e. – you’d rather have “Tax Invoice”). The same applies for estimates.
We’ve added quick access to your Web Invoices and Web Estimates.
The new PDF engine is also able to render many more languages. See an example of some languages below:
The biggest win is that we now have the flexibility we need for adding features to our invoices and estimates in the future. Any change will automatically work in the app and as a PDF.
We hope this new PDF engine makes your Harvest experience even better.
Today, we’re excited to announce the release of one of our most highly-requested features – the ability to start the week on Saturday, Sunday or Monday.
Harvest timesheets have always started on Monday. However, many companies begin their timesheets on Saturday or Sunday, and they approve time weekly based on that start day. It’s been a goal of ours for a while to have Harvest accomodate this worklflow, but we knew that this was a much bigger update than it seemed. Shifting the start day affects all the time a company has entered in Harvest, making it critical that this feature be implemented with the utmost care. With this in mind, we’ve taken every precaution to make sure that a complicated behind-the-scenes switch seems like a simple and seamless one from the Harvest UI.
If your company starts its week on Saturday or Sunday, simply head to Manage > Account Settings and update the Start Week On preference. Harvest Timesheets and Reports will be updated to start the week on the selected day, and timesheets will be approved based on that week.
We hope customizing the start of the workweek makes your Harvest experience even better, and as always, send us your feedback!
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.
Update June 15, 2011: the new email system has been launched!
Harvest sends hundreds of thousands of emails each week on behalf of our customers and 99% of those emails are delivered successfully. The remaining 1% can run into problems – sometimes messages are quarantined, spammed, or trashed on the receivers’ end. Our customers depend on Harvest to track time, then invoice for all those billable hours – and it’s critical that the invoice emails reach the customers’ inbox.
We have worked with several customers, their email providers, and our hosting provider and we’ve completely overhauled our email delivery system, which is launching early next week. This new system should ensure a much higher email delivery rate – and there are a few changes that will impact your workflow.
Unified Sender Email Address
The most significant change is that each email you send to your client via Harvest will no longer be “from” your email address. With the new email system, each Harvest email will be from "Your Name” <notifications@harvestapp.com>. The reply-to field of each message will remain your email address – so your customer can still easily reply to the email message and get back to you as they would normally.
There is a technical reason for this change. Before the new system, Harvest would “whitelabel” the sender email address of each email (i.e. the “From” of each invoice email is from your own email address). This meant that there was simply no way for a system receiving the email from Harvest to verify Harvest as the sender of the email, since the email was “from” your own email address. Sometimes this was sufficient for receiving mail systems to discard the incoming email. With the new system, the receiving email system can look at Harvest’s DNS records (SPFDKIM for the technically minded), certain cryptographic headers in the email itself, and validate that the sender is who they claim to be, ie: Harvest. Continue Reading …
We’re excited to announce the release of one of the most requested features in Harvest: the Uninvoiced Report! This new report will help you catch any missed invoicing opportunities, and will significantly speed up the invoicing process. Here’s a quick video to explain how it all works:
Invoice Faster
The goal of this report is simple and straightforward. It allows you to quickly scan and find all the outstanding, unbilled amounts for each client and project. You can view the amount by month, quarter or year; and each client has an “Invoice” button – click it to create an invoice for the selected timeframe. If your account has rounding turned on, this report will automatically round the hours according to how you configure it.
Here are some other features we’ve added to enhance the Uninvoiced Report:
Check the Active Projects Only box to hide any archived projects
Uninvoiced Hour and Expense amounts generate detailed reports
You can Export this report to Excel or CSV
We hope the Uninvoiced Report helps your business stay on top of its numbers and get paid faster for all of your hard work. Thank you for your continued support and helpful feedback, and we look forward to hearing from you!
In the next few weeks, we will be launching a couple of big updates in the Reports section of your Harvest account.
We’re carrying over the new look and feel of the recently updated Time Report to the rest of the Reports section, and along the way, overhauling a few bits and pieces. We are also presenting a brand new Uninvoiced Report, one of the most highly requested features from the Harvest community.
The new Uninvoiced Report will be the place for your business to check for all of the time and expenses that have not been invoiced. The numbers are grouped by clients, broken down by projects – with a convenient button to invoice for the total unbilled amount.
The other significant update that will affect your workflow is an overhauled Detailed Time Report. We’re updating the report form with an all-new, super fast, auto-complete input filter. The new filters allow for selecting multiple items for the same category – so you can, for example, generate a report for multiple projects and tasks all at once.
We’re now in the final phase of testing and tweaking these new features, and we will launch the new features in the coming weeks. Thanks for your patience and continuing support, and we look forward to sharing the fruits of our labor soon!
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
It’s arrived! Welcome to the brand new Harvest Time Report:
A redesign of the Time Report has been a long time coming. Reports need to effectively present the overwhelming amount of data your company enters every day, in a format that’s easy to analyze and understand. At its core, the Time Report is a decision-making tool. We want Harvest to help you make better decisions and the new version of Reports was designed with this in mind.
Here are a few of the enhancements in the new Time Report:
Easy to Scan
The new interface is designed to make it easy to understand the overall health of your business. We’ve added a summary panel at the top of the page that quickly shows you the big picture: total hours, billable percentage, billable amount, and uninvoiced amount. Details of this summary are displayed in a table organized by Clients, Projects, Tasks, and Staff. This layout will help you find what you need fast.
Published December 12th, 2011 by Matt Lettini 
