In 2011, we made over 800 updates to Harvest. We had countless conversations with our customers, added new features, refined old features and fixed issues. The constant evolution is a part of who we are as a cloud-based software company. A new update can be deployed to our customers in over 100 countries in an instant and we love that.

It’s About the Team

Behind the scenes, we’ve focused on growing our team. By December of 2011, we added 8 brilliant Harvesters to round out the team at 19. We’ve learned new ways to work together, whether it’s creating Delta Force teams for support, thinking through feature requests, or getting face time with our customers.

With every new team member we add to Harvest, we’re adding one more mind that’s completely focused on making the Harvest experience better for our customers. Updates are done faster, problems are solved more efficiently and our customer service gets even better (send our support team an email during business hours and you’ll hear back from us within 15 minutes).

It’s been a tremendously educational year for us as a team. If you’d like to learn with us, we’re hiring. :)

Turning 5 Years Old

2011 also marked the 5th year we’re in business as Harvest. Harvest was first created to meet the time tracking needs that Shawn and I had during our days as a design studio.

Since the beginning, we’ve taken the approach of building things one step at a time. At first, it was out of necessity of being bootstrapped, but later, it was because we wanted to keep things simple. Year after year, more and more people adopted Harvest to power their businesses. In the process, we’re honored to have picked up the best kind of funding possible for a company: paying customers. Without the distractions of fundraising, we are free to focus on just making Harvest better.

We couldn’t have done it without the support of our amazing community and customers, so when we turned 5 in April, we launched our Giving Back program. As our users tracked time, we allocated donations towards important causes addressed by Doctors Without Borders, Room to Read and charity: water.

The first 5 years was just the beginning.

A Better Harvest

Our business philosophy is simple: create a great product and tell people about it. There are no gimmicks and no shortcuts. We simply love creating something useful and we’re happiest when our customers tell us how we’ve saved them time and hassle.

Our team proudly stands behind what Harvest offers and we’ve prepared a little something to look back on the major updates last year: Harvest 2011 Year In Review.

Thank you for a great 2011. We can’t wait to share the goodness with you in 2012.

Santa and his elves are hard at work -- mostly focused on the "Nice List" project, although the naughty list has seen some time logged.

Whether you’re planning on tracking your time against that very important project with a December 26th deadline, or on the relaxing by the fire with a book task, we’ve got you covered! Although I’m sure I won’t be the last to say it, thank you all for using Harvest in 2011.  Have a great (and safe) holiday season, and we’re looking forward to working with you through 2012 and beyond!

Today we’re announcing a significant update for our Free official Harvest Android app, version 1.3. This update brings improved reliability with your Android phone syncing to your online Harvest account.

We launched our Android app in March of this year. This summer we overhauled the entire syncing engine in our iPhone app with brand new API calls, and now we’ve brought these new API calls to our Android app. They are a much more efficient and reliable way to sync time and expenses on your phone, even on-the-go!

Along with the reliability updates, this version also includes some new features and other improvements, including:

• Sync button added to Pending tab
• Project Codes are now displayed
• ‘Report Issues’ directly from the options menu
• Various bug fixes
• New icon

Enjoy, and let us know how the Harvest Android app is working for you. If you’re running into any phone-specific issues, let us know by writing into support.

Visit Android time tracker to learn more and download this companion app for free.

One of our most popular feature requests has been a more flexible user permissions system. Most importantly, administrators needed the ability to give project managers more control over their projects. We’re excited to announce that we’ve made this possible – administrators can now choose which project managers can create projects, view rates, or generate invoices for projects they manage.

Customizing User Permissions

There are three different roles that can be assigned under Manage > People:

We do hope the downtime will be less than the stated two hours. Please follow @harvest on Twitter and Harvest Status for real time updates from the team during this work. Thanks for your patience!

This past week, we recovered from Thanksgiving, evolved the recent invoice update, updated the Harvest Forum, released a new Harvest Customers section (full write-up to follow soon!), and tied up all loose ends for a major release next week: a more flexible and powerful way to control user permissions.

Some things Harvesters talked about this week on Co-op:

• We’re having a little Holiday Meetup next week at Harvest HQ, and you’re all invited!
• Yesterday (Dec 1st) marks the second full year that our Sys Admin Extraordinaire, Warwick Poole, joined Harvest!
• Matthew Lettini’s feedback on Android: “taking a screenshot of an android phone is so convoluted that I’m just going to take a picture of it with my iPhone.” But we are making good progress on the latest Harvest Android App – coming soon!
• Kim linked to this neat little printer. We’re not sold on the usefulness but we’re impressed with the well-crafted site (hint: scroll down).
• Speaking of little: T.J. professed his love for Rails for the little things.
• While designing the case study for Cuban Council, Lettini noticed their interesting uniform policy.
• Fun fact: Did you know that the national flag of Nepal is the world’s only national flag that is non-quadrilateral in shape?
• In the news: Stalin’s daughter died, and that reminded Warwick of Nandos, a fast food chain in South Africa, has a history of awesome commercials which upset every group imaginable.
• Some articles on our reading list: Say No to SOPA, A Town in New York Creates Its Own Department Store, Open Source (Almost) Everything.
• On our Watercooler Tumblr: good reminder from Murakami and deconstructed time.

Now we’re turning our focus to feature requests – we get dozens of them each week. These requests come in through various channels, like Twitter, over the phone, by email, and through the Harvest Forum. We take feature requests very seriously and strive to keep an accurate count of how many people have asked for something, what exactly their use case is, and how we can get in touch with them (so that we can ask further questions as we begin to develop a feature, and to let folks know when their request has been realized as a brand new, working feature).

We’ve found that the Harvest Forum isn’t doing a great job to facilitate feature requests, and here’s why:

1. It’s hard to keep track of who has requested a feature through the Forum, and to get a clear picture of what they’re looking for. When a request comes in by email, we can interact one-on-one with the requester and get a clear picture of what they need. Sometimes they ask for one thing, and by the time we’re done talking, they realize that what they really need is something different. That’s hard to discern when something is followed up by a string of posts that just contain “+1″.
2. Forum activity does not directly correspond to our most frequently requested features (but it sure looks that way). If somebody posts about a really great idea, and 25 people respond that that’s a great idea, new forum visitors may get the wrong impression that that is our most requested feature (our current most popular feature request internally has 237 requests). That can lead to a bit of a mob mentality and questions like “why aren’t you working on this, it’s clearly a popular idea” being asked.
3. When we handle feature requests one-on-one we can go above and beyond, by recommending work-arounds, 3rd party integrations, or alternate ways of approaching something.

What’s Changing in the Harvest Forum

As of today, we’ll no longer accept new posts to the Feature Requests section of the Harvest Forum, and we’ll be asking you to instead email us directly. We encourage you to continue to utilize the forum to discuss ideas, ask and answer questions on how to use Harvest and the Harvest API, and talk with other Harvest users.

We’ll be leaving the Feature Requests section of the Forum online as a reference for folks, but we will be encouraging folks to get in touch with us directly with their feature requests. We’re going to try to reframe our forums as a place for cooperation, where any member of the Harvest community: staff, customers, 3rd party developers, can ask questions and help out one another. Harvest staff will still be present in the Forum, but we’ll be able to focus our efforts on helping people, rather than simply thanking them for their suggestions.

We’re excited about this change, and we’re looking forward to continuing to work with our amazing and insightful community of Harvest users.

We here at Harvest have a lot to be thankful for this year: amazing customers, each other, and our loving families. This weekend, we’re going to be tracking some time against the “Family” project, on the “Over-eating” and “Sleeping it off” tasks. Support will be available by email only on Thursday, November 24th and Friday, November 25th. We may be a little slower than typical getting back to you, but you can definitely expect a reply within 24 hours. If you have a question or concern, please write to us at support [at] harvestapp.com or by completing the online help request form.

Harvest will return to normal hours on Monday, November 28th. We hope that you have a great weekend!

We believe this change will benefit all of our customers. IE7 was released five years ago and is two major releases behind the latest version of Internet Explorer. IE7 offers limited (at best) support for many of the modern web browser features that applications like Harvest rely on. Right now, we’re employing hacks and crutches to make IE7 usable for only a small percentage of our customers, and removing these will improve the speed and performance of Harvest for everyone.

IE7 is a terrible browser for the modern web and it’s holding all of us back. Every hour spent hacking a fix is an hour that could have been spent building something awesome.

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.