This quarter, the Harvest Team has spent 3,214 hours on new features, system improvements and customer support. We launched twomajor features, with three more coming this month. We have also carried out several infrastructure upgrades to make Harvest even faster and more reliable.
But we want to do more. We want to make Harvest an even more useful and powerful service for your business. To do that, we need people – smart, talented, humble, and hard-working folks to join a small team that makes a world-class business application. More specifically, we’re looking for two Rails Developers (junior or seasoned), a Ruby Systems Dev, and an Account Manager.
We need your help to spread the word. If you know of any talented folks that fit the bill, please let them know that Harvest is hiring. You can also help by passing the word to your friends and colleagues on Twitter or Facebook. Please help us build our team, and we will make Harvest even better for your business!
At Harvest, we have a ton of pride in our smart and creative users. The ideas you bring to life on top of our Harvest API are always surprising and inspiring. OAuth 2.0 and our new JavaScript SDK are two great tools coming into beta today, and we can’t wait to see what you do with them!
OAuth 2.0 is an industry standard for API authorization, used by Facebook, Google and others. With OAuth 2.0 you won’t need to store the passwords of Harvest users to build an integration. That means more security for Harvest users, and less liability for integration authors. You can learn more about the specifics of OAuth 2.0 and our implementation in the updated API authentication docs.
Our new JavaScript SDK is inspired by the ease of using Facebook Connect. Build integrations in pure client-side JavaScript, without thinking about Cross-domain requests and the details of OAuth 2.0. We’re already using it to add timers to our bug tracking and support tools. It’s a great way to bring Harvest to your other web apps.
Add timers to your bug tracking software in only HTML and JavaScript.
Import open invoice amounts from Harvest without using server-side programming.
Pull reporting into JavaScript to generate custom visualizations and charts.
If you’re a user or partner interested in working with our new API authentication and SDK options, make a request for OAuth credentials on this form, or drop us a line at api@getharvest.com for more information. While in beta, we’re going to issue credentials manually, and that form is the quickest way to get set up. If you’re not a code-slingin’ type of person, just know that we’re giving developers the best tools available for the next generation of Harvest integrations.
Your comments and feedback about these API additions are important – please do get in touch!
Today, we’re excited to announce the release of one of our most highly-requested features – the ability to start the week on Saturday, Sunday or Monday.
Harvest timesheets have always started on Monday. However, many companies begin their timesheets on Saturday or Sunday, and they approve time weekly based on that start day. It’s been a goal of ours for a while to have Harvest accomodate this worklflow, but we knew that this was a much bigger update than it seemed. Shifting the start day affects all the time a company has entered in Harvest, making it critical that this feature be implemented with the utmost care. With this in mind, we’ve taken every precaution to make sure that a complicated behind-the-scenes switch seems like a simple and seamless one from the Harvest UI.
If your company starts its week on Saturday or Sunday, simply head to Manage > Account Settings and update the Start Week On preference. Harvest Timesheets and Reports will be updated to start the week on the selected day, and timesheets will be approved based on that week.
We hope customizing the start of the workweek makes your Harvest experience even better, and as always, send us your feedback!
If you are reading this, then you are hitting Harvest servers in our new datacenter. The migration went well, except for some performance issues which took us a while to investigate. Harvest was offline from 9am EDT until 1:55pm EDT. This was a very long outage, and not something we are looking to repeat anytime soon. We look forward to serving your needs from our new datacenter and thank you very much for your patience while we made this switch.
On our Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we place our customers squarely at the base of our pyramid. We simply don’t exist without the support of our customers and our part in that relationship is to provide useful applications reliably. We are pretty proud of our reliability thus far, but there is always room for improvement. To that end, we have been working feverishly behind the scenes to bring online a whole new set of servers with a new hosting provider. We are pleased to be partnering with our friends at Voxel to make Harvest more reliable and more responsive for our global customers.
Moving hosting providers is no mean feat and we’ve done the heavy lifting over the course of the last few months. To flip the switch we need to take Harvest offline for a few hours and sync up our two datacenters. Downtime is a curse word around here, but sometimes it is unavoidable.
We’ll be taking Harvest offline for 4 hours on Sunday, September 11th between 9am - 1pm EDT.
We are sorry about the downtime and we will work to minimize the outage window, but we trust this move will mean more stability for our platform as it grows. Thanks for your patience as we make this important switch.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at support@harvestapp.com and we’ll be glad to talk with you about this move.
Update:We’re excited to announce that the latest version of our Harvest iPhone app, v1.4, has been released. This version includes a bug fix for syncing expense receipts, and will also backup your receipt photos to your iPhone. You can find it in the App Store on your iPhone.
Today we’re announcing a significant update for our Free official Harvest iPhone app, version 1.3. You can find it in the App Store on your iPhone.
Improved Syncing Reliability
Version 1.3 brings improved reliability with the iPhone syncing to your online Harvest account. Being one of the first to bring offline syncing to time tracking, we’ve now made it even better. The previous code ran into a number of issues during sync, so we decided to overhaul the entire syncing engine. This overhaul includes the removal of 1000+ lines on code in favor of a brand new set of API calls for much more efficient and reliable syncing (these calls will soon be exposed to all API developers and integrations).
Tracking time and expenses on-the-go should be smoother than ever. As an added bonus, the new API calls now allow us to include conflict messages when a sync doesn’t work exactly as planned, so you know exactly what happened:
Other Features
Along with the reliability updates, this version also includes some new features and other improvements, including:
You can now create clients, projects, and tasks right from the app
A ‘Jump to Today’ button if you go to another day in Timesheets
A ‘Jump to this Week’ button if you go to another week in Expenses
Project Codes are now displayed
Increased font sizes on all inputs
Various bug fixes
New icon
Enjoy, and let us know how the Harvest iPhone app is helping your business. As always, let us know how we can make it even better.
The Harvest iPhone app allows iPhone users (with iOS 4) to track time and expenses on-the-go, with or without a network connection. You can start and stop task timers, add duration and notes, and upload expense receipts right from your iPhone. Learn more about iPhone Time Tracking.
Update at 9:55am EDT: We have completed this maintenance. We had to take a little extra time to finish it up and Harvest came back online at 9:54am EDT. Thanks for your patience while we upgraded.
On Sunday July 3rd, 2011 we plan to take Harvest offline beginning at 8am EDT and ending before 9:30am EDT for some database upgrades. What time is that for you?
Sorry for the short notice on this one, and please follow @harvest on Twitter for real time updates from the team during this work. Thanks for your patience, folks.
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 …
In December, we released Harvest HD, an update to Harvest which included a new, image-free button style. By eliminating the need for background images in our buttons, we’re able to deliver an improved button style with a faster load time for our users.
We’ve been including the new button style whenever we update a section of Harvest. This morning, we pushed out a release that removed all remaining instances of the old buttons, unifying button styles throughout Harvest.
While this change makes Harvest look nicer, we’ve also taken this opportunity to add some new functionality. For most forms in Harvest, you’ll now notice that when you click save or submit, the buttons will be disabled and a loading graphic will appear. This instant feedback lets you know that your form is processing and helps to ensure that there are no accidental double submits of your data.
This update reinforces consistent UI elements and behaviors throughout our app and helps us provide a seamless time tracking experience for all of our users.
Harvest is known for its simple and intuitive timesheet interface. Underneath that simplicity is a layer of fairly complicated business logic. A time entry has several states, and can be locked for different reasons – for example, if a project has been archived, or the hours have been invoiced. Sometimes a locked timesheet needs to be edited, and it used to be a time consuming process to unlock the timesheet to make necessary changes.
Recently, we took a hard look at the underlying rules, and improved many use cases. The biggest interface update that you will notice is that now, administrators can edit locked time and expense entries without having to unlock them.
Administrators will notice that editing locked time and expenses now works just like editing unlocked entries – hover your mouse over a time or expense, and you’ll see the Edit and X buttons. Click Edit to fix discrepancies or mistakes on a locked timesheet, and maintain accuracy across your timesheets, reports, and invoices.
Additionally, we’ve simplified the explanations about locked time and expenses and unified these messages across views, creating a clean interface that helps you understand why your time is locked.
This update will help you make those small but necessary tweaks to your timesheet, and we hope you find it useful!
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!
Published November 9th, 2011 by Shawn Liu 
While this change makes Harvest look nicer, we’ve also taken this opportunity to add some new functionality. For most forms in Harvest, you’ll now notice that when you click save or submit, the buttons will be disabled and a loading graphic will appear. This instant feedback lets you know that your form is processing and helps to ensure that there are no accidental double submits of your data.