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!

A wider, sharper-looking Web Invoice (formerly, Client View) is coming next Tuesday! Here’s a preview of how it will look:

Some highlights of the new layout:

• Wider canvas – The invoice will feel more roomy and can accommodate more information.
• Easier to read – We have tweaked the type, colors, spacing, and sizing – so that information is easier to read and scan.
• Sleek and fast – There is more visual punch to the look, taking advantage of CSS3, so the invoice remains lightweight and fast to load.
• Refreshed but familiar – We overhauled the structure and  design, but kept the look and feel familiar to minimize disruption.

The new Web Invoice comes with a new feature – integration with three popular payment gateways: Authorize.net, LinkPoint / First Data, and PayPal Website Payments Pro. With the new integration, you will be able to accept credit card payments on invoices, which means that your clients can pay much faster. There will be a separate blog post about this next week, explaining how the new feature will work.

This new invoice layout was re-envisioned and designed by Squared Eye, one of Harvest’s happy customers. Thank you, Matthew!

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

Continue Reading …

We have heard from many customers who need to track retainers in Harvest. You can invoice for a retainer today in Harvest – say, you invoice a client for $5,000. That works, but there’s no easy way to invoice the hours you worked, and draw from that $5,000 and keep track of remaining balance.

Today, we’re excited to announce a new feature to support retainers is coming this week. Here is what it will look like:

Our team has been hard at work on this feature for well over a month. The goal is to make it simple to track retainers, while at the same time offer enough functionality and information to make it useful.

How Will The Feature Work?

To start, there will be a new Invoices > Retainers section. You can create a retainer by creating a retainer invoice, and when you collect a payment on that invoice, the amount will go into the retainer funds.

To invoice the client later and draw from the retainer, you will simply create an invoice for the project hours, like you normally would. Harvest will show you a list of retainers to draw from. All you need to do is to choose the correct retainer, and Harvest will automatically draw from the funds, and update the retainer balance.

We’ll let you know when the feature is available later this week, and we’ll have a video showing exactly how to utilize it.

Our customers have been asking for more control over their invoices, and we’ve been listening. We’re happy to announce the first of many improvements coming down the pipeline for Harvest Invoicing users: Line Item Reordering.

You can change the order of items on an invoice, with just a few quick mouse clicks. While adding or editing an invoice, click the “Reorder Rows” link and the individual rows will become sortable. Just click and drag a row to change it’s position on the invoice.

When you’re done moving items, you can simply save the invoice, or click “Done Reordering” to continue editing the invoice details.

We hope you find this new invoice improvement useful. As always, don’t hesitate to share your feedback and suggestions with us.

If you’ve ever wanted to download all of your PDF invoices from Harvest, you’ll be happy to know that there’s now a way to do just that! To access this new feature, go to the Manage tab and click on Account Settings. Scroll to the bottom, where you’ll see a Download Zip of All Invoices button. Just click the button and grab a cup of coffee while Harvest generates a zip file containing all of your invoices in PDF format.

We hope you find this new feature useful, and let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

Happy new year! We’re starting this new year with a new, neat feature: Harvest now offers more flexibility for rounding and invoicing hours. When you export or invoice hours, you now have the option to round to nearest, or round up to 6, 15 or 30 minutes.

Another big improvement is that Harvest now supports incremental billing. What that means: if you have this option turned on, when you invoice and choose the “Summary by…” option, Harvest will round the hours first, and then sum them up. Some of our customers prefer to sum up the hours, and then round the totals – and you can still do that by not choosing the incremental billing option.

Both options can be updated via Invoices > Configure, under the section Default Values.

Hope you find this new feature useful, and please let us know if you have any questions or comments!

Here’s a recap of a bunch of recent updates to Harvest:

• Discounts on Invoices and Estimates – You can now easily put in a percentage discount on invoices and estimates. Just type in a percentage number and Harvest will calculate the correct discount value for your clients.
• Duplicate Estimate – It works just like duplicate invoice. Go to Estimates, click on the estimate you’d like to duplicate. Under More Actions menu, you’ll find the Duplicate option. If you have file attachments on the original estimate, Harvest will copy over those files as well.
• Export Client Contacts – Under Manage > Clients, you can now export all client contacts info to Excel. This will be useful when you need to generate mailing list for clients.
• Improved Unsubmitted – For those of you who use the Timesheets Approval feature, under the Timesheets > Unsubmitted section, where it lists out the people who have not submitted their timesheets, you can now see the hours on each timesheet. This is also a handy way for administrators to check on the total weekly hours for each staff member.
• Send Invoice via API – We have updated the Harvest API so that you can send invoices via the API.

We hope you find these new features helpful! As usual, we’d like to thank all of our customers for your generous feedback and support. Should you have any questions or suggestions, please get in touch with us!

We’re excited to announce the launch of the new Estimates feature. You can now create, send and manage estimates within your Harvest account. Like the Invoice feature, Harvest lets you create a professional estimate with just a few clicks, and everything is organized in a easy-to-scan dashboard for you to track what is outstanding, what has been recently accepted or declined:

Here’s a highlight of cool things you can do with the new Estimates feature:

• Your client can access the estimate via a private URL, where they can accept or decline the estimate.
• Attach files to your estimate – and your clients can download online (via the private URL). No more emails with bulky attachments! Your client will simply receive one simple email with a link to view and download everything.
• Just like the Invoice feature, you can customize and translate every phrase on the estimate (via Estimates > Configure).
• Once an estimate is accepted, you can turn it into an invoice with just one click.

To start using the new Estimates feature: Go to Manage > Account Settings, and you’ll find a new Customize Modules section. Click on “Choose Modules” and you can activate the new Estimates feature.

Just a reminder: the “project estimate” feature has been renamed to “project budget“.

We hope you find this new feature useful, and please let us know if you have any questions or feedback!