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.

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!

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 (SPF DKIM for the technically minded), certain cryptographic headers in the email itself, and validate that the sender is who they claim to be, ie: Harvest.

Customizable Sender Profiles

With the new set up, we are launching a new feature for you to create different sender profiles, under Invoices > Configure:

You can create different sender profiles, such as: “Accounts Receivable” <receivable@your-domain.com> – and you can choose to send your invoice from that name, and the reply-to address will be the email you provide.

Note that the email address has to be valid, and Harvest does not set up the email address for you.

Improved Handling of Bounced Messages

With our previous setup, we have no way of telling if an email bounced. With this new system, if an email bounces from your client’s email provider, we can now detect it right away and let you know.
What are some possible reasons why an email bounces? A mistyped email address, a full mailbox, client is out of the office, or problems with mail servers. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, Harvest will email you to let you know that the message has been bounced. We will also record the incident under the Invoice History section of that particular invoice.

Apart from the obvious benefits of this new email system, there are a couple of under-the-hood benefits which we believe will make Harvest’s mail capabilities truly world class.

Internal queuing of outbound email

Before handing the outbound emails off to the final delivery service, the new Harvest mail system will first create a queued version of the outbound email on the Harvest systems. This robust system will allow Harvest to resend messages which fail due to any upstream provider issues as well as retry the delivery of email using different services, if required.

Using a commercial email delivery partner

Truly reliable email sending can be complex at times. This is mostly because of the spam industry which plagues us all. Harvest has partnered with Postmark to handle the delivery of outbound emails. This means our customers can take advantage of a dedicated service who monitors the quality of the infrastructure which sends these emails, maintains excellent IP reputation and has access to advanced troubleshooting tools when things go wrong.

More to Come

We will be monitoring the progress of our new email system and we’re striving for the highest deliverability possible. There will be more tweaks and improvements under the hood; the goal is to have a solid mail system, so you can rest easy knowing that all important client messages are delivered. In the near future, we will also be looking at more features on the user front, so you can tell if a client indeed viewed the email message or invoice.

Thank you for your continued support, and please let us know if you have any questions or feedback!

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.

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!

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.

Better Organization

The Detailed Time Report previously grouped all results by Date. Now you can group results by any category that you use to filter your report. Each group displays the hour total with a clear breakdown of time entries below. Grouping results keeps Detailed Time Reports clear and organized for you and your clients.

Other Improvements

We’ve made some other notable improvements, including:

This feature took us 182.13 hours.

• Refreshed visual design with better spacing.
• Improved interaction for marking hours as invoiced or uninvoiced.
• We’ve also brought over all of these changes to the Expense Report.

All of the changes we’ve made make the new Detailed Time Report easier to generate, scan, and use in and out of Harvest. Additionally, we’ve got more new features coming to Harvest Reports next week. While you’re looking forward to these, enjoy the new Detailed Time and Expense Reports, and let us know what you think!

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!

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.

Building A Better Button with CSS3

One of the biggest changes in Harvest HD is our push for CSS3. With CSS3, we are able to create smooth gradients, rounded corners, and drop shadows without the use of images. This significantly cuts down on our HTTP requests (ie. page load time). The navigation is also now done in CSS3, though it looks strikingly the same, with the Home icon remaining the only image. We’re excited to start bringing these buttons and techniques to the rest of the app.

A Word for Internet Explorer Users

Internet Explorer users may notice that the image above does not match the navigation they’re seeing in their Harvest Account. This is because Internet Explorer 7 and 8 do not support many of the modern techniques available in other browsers. While there are methods available to bring rounded corners and shadows into Internet Explorer, many of them impact load and render speeds by loading extra files or downloading additional images. Harvest continues to support IE 7/8 by making sure that any advanced techniques we employ degrade gracefully and work without changing your workflow. We’re hopeful that the next version of Internet Explorer (IE9) will be released soon, as it brings with it improved CSS3 support.

Leaner and Faster

In addition to the CSS3 changes, HD helps us work toward our goal of making Harvest leaner and faster. Improvements in this latest release will allow us to shrink the size of our CSS and Javascript packages, and we’ve gotten a little smarter about our asset caching. While these improvements won’t change the way Harvest works for you, we hope you’ll notice that Harvest has a little extra pep in its step.

This update has been a long time coming, and we’re excited about today’s launch. Though the largest impact can be felt in Invoices and Estimates, Harvest HD gives us a strong foundation for future improvements to all areas of our application.  Take a spin through your Harvest account to see how this wider, roomier view feels, and enjoy!

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.