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.
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!
Since January of this year, we’ve curated and shared #workbetter articles via @harvest on twitter. The goal was to provide you with the very best advice for growing your business. We’re expanding on our lofty goal by sharing our own knowledge and tools geared towards helping you work better. You can find what we crafted over at the new Resources Section, or read on for a quick tour of the section.
Harvest Guides -We’ve started to distill down conversations we’ve had with team leaders, who use Harvest every workday. From these conversations we’ve assembled a series of Harvest Guides that cover how small business owners and project managers can get started with team time tracking, and how to get the most out of it. For example, our Time Tracking for Project Managers Guide will walk you through how to use reports in Harvest to better allocate time on future projects.
Free Templates - We love our in-app timesheets and invoices. They are impeccably designed and powerful. However, for your friends and like-minded strangers who are completely new to tracking time, or are looking for a basic invoice, we’ve created simple, editable versions of both. As an example, our Daily Timesheet template is ready to download and print, and is structured to help you keep track of your day in 15 minute increments. Track time this way for a few weeks, and you’ll have a much better picture of where your time is going. Our Invoice template also comes ready to be filled out, and looks professional. Most of the templates are already available in PDF or Google Docs. If you’re trying to hook your friends on the benefits of time tracking or automated invoicing, the free templates can be their gateway drug.
Webinar Series – Our Getting Started with Harvest Webinar Series covers the basics of Harvest’s core features including time tracking, invoicing, and reporting. The series has been popular, so we’re giving it a permanent home. You can learn more about the series, sign up, and share pre-recorded Webinar clips with your friends or colleagues to get them started with Harvest. Down the road, we’ll be expanding the Webinar Series to include integration tutorials and more.
As we continue adding to the new Resources section, we’d love to hear feedback from you. What else would you like to see? What are you reading or using right now to improve the way you work? If you’re using Harvest to work more effectively, we’d love to know your thoughts, let us know!
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 …
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.
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!
Last month, we revealed the new Harvest Time Report, and since then, we’ve continued working on updates to the other sections of Harvest Reports. Today, we’re launching the new Detailed Time Report. It’s faster and more precise, enabling you to easily create the exact reports you need. Take a look:
Find What You Need
We’ve added new input filters that make it so you can quickly choose what to include in your report. Simply start typing what you’re searching for and results will appear instantaneously. You can also select multiple items for the same category. Want to see a report for your two most tracked Tasks? This is now possible with the new filters. Continue Reading …
As we head into the new year, we recognize that tax season can be very difficult for businesses large and small. Face this tax season confidently by attending a live webinar and Q&A on how to use integrated finance apps that you can find on the Google Apps Marketplace. We’ll be hosting the webinar with Google and leading online financial apps Shoeboxed and Outright.
Harvest, along with Shoeboxed and Outright, will show you how Google Marketplace apps can help you organize your financial documents, streamline invoicing, and aggregate your accounting information. We’ll demonstrate how easy it is to seamlessly manage your accounts payables and receivables through Harvest, and how our contextual gadget in Gmail streamlines invoicing activities.
Please join us on Wednesday, January 26, 2011, 11:00 a.m. PST / 2:00 p.m. EST: Register now!
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.
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.
Published November 15th, 2011 by Matt Lettini 
