We’ve just released a few updates to the Harvest invoicing tool: an improved Invoice Dashboard, draft mode for invoices, and a brand new Payments Received Report.

The Invoice Dashboard has been updated so that you can quickly scan through all the outstanding invoices, and see what invoices are in draft mode, which have already been sent, or which are late.  You can also use the nifty links on top to filter through the list and see only the ones you need.

We’ve also added draft mode to invoices, so when you create and save a new invoice, it will be saved as a draft – until you send it through Harvest, or mark it as sent by clicking More Actions > Mark As Sent.

The new Payments Received Report makes keeping track of invoice payments easier and more accurate. You can quickly generate a report that shows what payments have been received in a given timeframe. Just go to Invoices > Report, click on “Create New Report” and you’ll see two options: generate an Invoice Report, or a Payments Received Report.

Many of the new features and improvements we add to Harvest come directly from you, the Harvest users. What other improvements can we add to Harvest invoicing to help simplify your billing? Please let us know via the support form.

If you are working or plan on working with the Harvest API and Ruby, we have some great news. An open-sourced Harvest API Ruby wrapper is now available thanks to the kind folks at Alexander Interactive.  This first release of the API wrapper and supports most of the methods in our API.  A big thanks to Kyle Banker at Ai for sharing this with us! If you’re a developer working with the Harvest API, please feel free to check out (or contribute) to this ongoing project.

We’ve added a bunch of new features to Harvest, right before we welcome the new year:

• Estimate by people hours. It works just like estimate by task hours, but you can now put in estimated hours by each person on each project.
• Duplicate invoice. On each invoice, you can now duplicate the invoice by clicking on the button More Actions > Duplicate.
• Quarterly recurring invoice. We added an option to send out recurring invoices each quarter.
• Optional project notes. By default, project notes are only shown to administrators on your account.  You can change that permission, so that project managers can also see the notes.  To do that, go to Manage > Account Settings.  Look under Preferences and you can edit the setting there.
• Department for people. You’ll find an extra field under Manage > People.  You can put in a department for each person, and then under Reports > Detailed Reports you can run reports for each department (note: this is only for Business Plan accounts).

Hope you find the new updates useful!

Many of our international customers need to apply more than one tax to their invoices, and now you can do that in Harvest.  Create any invoice, and after you put in the first tax, you’ll notice a link next to the tax field that says, Apply another tax.  Click on that and you’ll get the second tax field.

You can also specify your default taxes via Invoices > Configure.  Look for the section Default Settings, and click on the link Specify default values.  You’ll then see a screen much like the screenshot above.  You can type in your taxes, and choose how you’d like your taxes calculated.  If you’re a Canadian business, the Compound method is probably what you’re looking for.

You can also translate the label for the second tax via Invoices > Configure, under the section Translation (towards the bottom of the page).

Today we are introducing a new feature for you to set up scheduled, recurring invoices, which Harvest will automatically create and send for you.  Let’s say you bill your customer monthly for a retainer, now you can create a recurring invoice, and each month on a scheduled date, Harvest will send your client the invoice automatically.  You will have less things to worry about, and the recurring invoice dashboard will help you keep track of all your periodic billing in one place.

How does it work?

Navigate to Invoices > Recurring, click on the button “Create recurring invoice“. Choose a client, and you’ll see the invoice form, which is very similar to the normal invoice form except for an extra section on top for you to choose the start date, frequency and recipient for the invoice.

You can also create a recurring invoice out of an existing invoice: go to any of your invoices in Harvest, and along on top where all the buttons are – you’ll see a new button that says, “Create recurring“. Click on that, and Harvest will automatically pull all that data into the recurring invoice form.

We hope you find this new feature useful!

Here at Harvest, our goal is to help our customers track and organize their business’s time and money.  In line with this goal, we’ll be releasing a new Account Overview screen next week.  This screen allows our customers to see, at-a-glance, how much time has been logged recently, the amount of money collected via invoicing, how active projects are tracking against project estimates, and any bits about Harvest we may have published to this blog. And to get more information on any of the statistics on this screen, one simply clicks to drill down for more information.

We think the Account Overview screen will be a great way for individuals and teams to stay on top of their hours, project progress and invoices.  Look for this new screen in all account next week!

Note: Screenshot shows the Account Overview screen as seen by an administrator.  Project managers and normal users see information pertaining to their assigned projects and time only.

Update 6 Aug, 2008 – Account Overview is now available for all accounts!  Just click on the Reports tab.

Invoice summary is a new idea we think you and your clients will appreciate.  Often times we find ourselves staring at a list of invoices in the dashboard, not knowing what each invoice is for until we click into it and read the content.  Now, if you put in an invoice summary (e.g. “Project A initial payment.”), the summary will display on the dashboard so you can refer to the invoice quickly.  Like this:

You can also include the invoice summary line in the email to your client, so they can quickly see what the invoice is about in the email message (without having to open up the invoice PDF).  It’ll also make searching for old invoices in email a lot faster and easier.  To configure the email, go to Invoices > Configure, you can customize the email message under the section Translation (where you can also change the label ‘Summary’ to something more to your liking).

Hope you find this new addition useful!

Good news for customers who have clients in different countries:  you can now change currency on each invoice.  Just create an invoice, and you’ll find a new dropdown box below tax where you can choose from a long list of currencies.  Harvest will tally up the invoices, so you know how much you’re making and collected in each currency.

Bonus: you can choose a preferred currency for each client (under Manage > Clients), so the next time you create an invoice for the client, the currency will be chosen for the invoice automatically.

We’ve recently released a couple of handy features for Harvest’s invoicing component:

Default invoice values – under Invoices > Configure you can now specify your default tax rate, payment terms, and invoice notes.

Translation – you can translate and customize every single phrase on the invoice and also the invoice email to your client.  Go to Invoices > Configure, stroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on “Translate labels and message”.  Note that the translated phrases will show up on the invoice PDF only.

Happy invoicing!

We’ve just pushed out a few changes to vastly improve the look of the PDF invoices you can generate and send from Harvest. Here’s a look at what’s new:

1. A new, clean invoice layout that’s professional and simple. We re-worked the spacing, type, and overall layout to make the invoice template easy on the eyes.
   
2. Support for high-resolution logo – simply upload a high-resolution image of your logo (1500+ pixels wide recommended, we’ll re-size it for you) and see your logo crisp and sharp on your PDFs.

An example:

We hope you (and your clients) enjoy the new look!

Looking for a fast way to generate beautiful, professional invoices for your business?
Try Harvest for free and create your first invoice within minutes!