Five years ago, we created Harvest with two goals: to take the pain (and ugly) out of time tracking, and to create a powerful report that’s easy to read by normal people like you and me. What we came up with was a deceptively simple and visual interface on top of layers of complex data. You can quickly glance at a report and find out what projects are consuming the most of your business’s time, and click one button to see distribution of billable hours.

Over the years, the reporting tool became more sophisticated with even more data: billable amount, budget, invoiced vs uninvoiced hours, etc. Frankly, the original interface structure is not holding up to the amount of data points Harvest supports today.

Late last year, we set out to improve Reports. We started with a customer survey, and thanks to your participation, we received a ton of amazing feedback. We sifted through your comments and boiled everything down to a few major goals, providing us with a solid direction as we began our overhaul of Reports. We’ve been working hard on this project since January, and have internally nicknamed the project “Reports 2.0.” Here’s a preview:

We’ve broken up the goals into different milestones, and the initial release of Reports 2.0 is coming Tuesday, March 8th. Here are some of the highlights that you can expect:

1. Blazing fast report render – Our development team rebuilt the reporting engine from scratch, taking advantage of some of the cool, new things that came from Rails 3.
2. A spanking new Staff report – This is one of the highest requested reports from the survey, and we added a few bells and whistles to make it easier to scan the report.
3. Improved navigation and data layout – You’ll see a brief summary of important data points on top, and a clearer table structure makes it easier to digest numbers and details.

And there are many more improvements and surprises for you to uncover next week. Our design and development team have poured their hearts into this project and it’s a work of beauty. We can’t wait to share the fruits of our labor, and thank you all for your patience, support and feedback!

Harvest is nearly 5 years old and serving thousands of customers from over 100 countries. It’s great to be in this position, but with a large user base comes the responsibility of receiving many feature requests. Requests flow in via email, support requests, blog comments, Twitter, and often on our forum. How do we handle such a high volume of requests?

Two Buckets

We categorize requests into two buckets:

1. Things we plan to work on.
2. Things we don’t – requests we don’t hear of often, or suggestions that don’t fit our vision.

Feature requests that fall in the first bucket are tricky. We genuinely want to work on a lot of these features, but if something is not in our immediate plan, the best we can tell you is that “it’s on our list.”  Whether it’s through email or the forum, we can only say that so many times before we start to sound insincere.

Whatever the case, we ask each prospective customer to make their purchase decision based on what is available in Harvest today. We are constantly improving Harvest, but we simply cannot promise a timeline for new features. We do not make false promises.

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Two weeks ago, we launched the new Harvest Help Center. The goal for the redesign was to provide comprehensive and well-organized content, so you could get what you need and move on with your day. We thought the design was effective, but how do we really measure and continuously improve the Help Center? Stats from Google Analytics tell us part of the story, but nothing beats actual customer feedback. So today, we’re launching a small feature so you can tell us directly how we’re doing:

At the bottom of each help article, you’ll find a “Was this article helpful?” question. If something was helpful, great! If not, leave some suggestions on how we can improve. Your feedback will help us update current articles and guide us in writing future ones.

As always, get in touch, and let us know how it’s working for you!

We’re ready to unveil our shiny, new Harvest Support! We’ve added a whole lot of content, changed the layout, and incorporated a fast and efficient instant search.  Here’s a peek:

Take it for a spin, and read on to find out more about the specifics of what we’ve done.

Why the Redesign?

We love talking to our customers, but we understand that it’s more convenient for you to find answers to your questions through a support section. Our old Help & Support was full of useful information, but it was hard to scan, and some of the content was outdated. We wanted our support section to be easy to use, so you could get what you need and move on with your day.

The new section has been dubbed Harvest Support, and it’s divided into three main parts: the Help Center, the Forum, and a Contact Support form. Help Center is where you’ll find our updated and new help content, reorganized and easily searchable with our fast instant search.

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We recently added signature authentication for Harvesters who accept online payments using PayPal Website Payments Pro (WPP). Previously you could only connect Harvest with your PayPal WPP account using a downloadable certificate. Now you can link the two with a signature. Both options are PayPal SSL encrypted and secure.

If you would like to switch from certificate to signature authentication (and vice versa) simply change the settings in your PayPal and Harvest account. Visit our help section to learn more about setting up PayPal Website Payments Pro for online invoicing.

Hi there! I’m Matthew, Harvest’s new visual designer, having joined the team here in October. So far I’ve been responsible for the new look of this main website and blog, recent ad campaigns, and now I’m onto updating the look and feel of Harvest. I’d like to explain what changes we’ve made today, and what these changes mean for you.

We’ve nicknamed this layout update Harvest HD. While we know it’s not quite 16:9, this new design brings a wider HD feel to the application. We’ve removed the borders around the main content area and pushed the page out to your full browser width. Before HD, Harvest had a minimum width of 840px, and HD takes us out to 980px.

In addition to widening every section of Harvest, we’ve brought in a modified version of a 16-column Blueprint Grid. We’ve brought the Invoices and Estimates pages into this grid already. As we move forward, we’ll be using the extra room and this unified grid to make better usability choices.

New Invoices and Estimates Pages

Highlights of these new pages include:

• Using CSS3 for the buttons and toolbar.
• Grouping all action buttons together.
• Bringing the Web Invoice/Estimate design into the app, so that you see what your client sees.
• An easier way to see if an estimate is accepted or declined.
• An invoice and estimate header that includes the most recent action and a link to the Invoice History.
• A cleaned up Invoice History log that is easier to scan.

Click image to view full.

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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.

According to our data, Harvest invoices with an option to pay via PayPal receive payments nearly 16 days faster (twice as fast) than invoices without an online payment option. Letting your clients pay online means that they can pay you faster – no more waiting for a check to deposit.

We’re excited to announce the second major Harvest update to help you get paid faster: payment gateway integration. With this new feature, you can accept credit cards right on the new and improved Web Invoice.

Click through for a live example!

Online Payment, the Harvest Way

Online payment is not new to the internet, but the way other websites do it is a laborious, multi-step process. The new payment process on your Harvest Web Invoice is exceptionally fast, and the entire flow happens on one page. When your client clicks the “Pay Invoice” button on the invoice, a simple and familiar payment form shows up immediately:

Your client will not be taken to a new page or have to wait for the page to load. Once they fill out the form, Harvest will take them back to the invoice with a confirmation message. The experience is seamless, simple and fast. The payment is recorded on the invoice immediately, and Harvest automatically sends your client a payment receipt customized with your logo.

Our design and development team also put in the extra effort to take care of the smallest details, such as the top left corner of the Web Invoice:

Here we want to highlight one major action: Pay Invoice. We put the invoice total next to the button, so there’s no confusion on how much is due, and there’s no need to scan the invoice for the total. We also show all the payment options with their familiar icons, so clients know that they can pay online.

Great. How Do I Set Up?

Harvest now integrates with these four major payment gateways:

• TrustCommerce
• Authorize.net
• PayPal Website Payments Pro
• LinkPoint / First Data

If you have an account with any of the four gateways, go to Invoices > Configure, click on “Online Payment” and put in your credentials.

Here’s a brief video to show you how to take advantage of this new feature:

We believe adding payment gateways and the ability to get paid directly from the web invoice can significantly speed up invoice payments and improve cash flow for your business. Please let us know if you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions!

In the next few weeks, we will be releasing a series of new features to help your business collect payments faster. Our first step, launched today, is the new and beautiful Web Invoice (formerly, Client View):

The new Web Invoice has been widened, refreshed, tweaked, and looks gorgeous. More importantly, we updated the code so that it’s lightweight and uses better markup that will make a few new ideas we have down the road possible, laying the groundwork for a much improved and faster online payment process. You can see a live example of the new invoice layout (please do not pay the actual invoice – it will process the payment for real!).

This view can be accessed by going to any of your invoices in Harvest and clicking on More Actions > Web Invoice. This is the web invoice that your clients will see if you have the PayPal integration turned on (turn this on via Invoices > Configure > Online Payment). Our next step will be applying the new design to the invoice view within your Harvest account, and to make it available in PDF.

As usual, please let us know if you have any questions or feedback!

We’re excited to announce that you can now manage retainers in Harvest. Here’s a short video of how the feature works:

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