If you are doing business in Canada and the EU, you may be required to collect two sets of taxes on many of your invoices. While this may seem like a complicated procedure, Harvest invoices make these calculations very simple. Harvest is able to calculate both simple and compound taxes in dual tax fields.

Invoicing with Simple Tax Calculation

In a Simple Tax situation, both federal and provincial taxes are applied equally to the principal invoice total. For example, on the invoice below, the pre-tax total is $750, and the 5% GST and 3% PST are applied equally to the subtotal, for a total amount of $810.00. This type of dual taxation is supported in Harvest invoices by going to Invoices > Configure and selecting ‘Simple Tax’.  If you are doing business in Canada outside of Quebec and PEI, you should use this setting.

Simple Tax: Tax 2 is calculated as a percentage of the subtotal.

Invoicing with Compound Tax Calculation

In a Compound Tax situation, the total cost of a product or service is taxed federally, then the total of that amount, including the federal tax, is taxed provincially a second time. For example, in the case below the invoice  $750 is taxed at 5% GST, for a subtotal of $787.50. Then, a second compound tax of 3% PST on the subtotal, in the amount of $23.63, is added to the total bill, for a final amount due of $811.13.  This type of dual taxation is supported in Harvest invoices by going to Invoices > Configure and selecting ‘Compound Tax’. If you are doing business in Canada, in Quebec or PEI, you should select this tax setting.

Compound Tax: Tax 2 is calculated as a percentage of the subtotal + tax 1.

Important Definitions

• Compound Tax – Also known as a stacked tax. Applying a second, provincial tax, on the total of the invoice including the Federal tax. In Canada, both Quebec and Prince Edward Island require a second, compound tax to be charged on goods and services.

• GST – Goods and Services Tax, charged Federally on good and services in Canada and the EU.

• PST – Provincial Sales Tax, charged locally on goods and services and can be applied as either a Simple or Compound tax depending on the geographic location.

We’ve just added another user requested feature to Harvest, the ability to create duplicate projects. This will allow you to create copies of projects, and can be used to create project templates of your most common task sets to save you setup time.

You can make a duplicate of an existing project by going to Manage > Projects and clicking the button labeled “Duplicate”.

If you create identical projects frequently for different clients, this new feature will simplify the process. For example, by creating a few project templates for the most common types of work you perform, you can now duplicate them for each new project, instead of manually creating them each time. Common projects can be cloned with just a click, so you can begin working with minimal setup time.

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.

I recently made my yearly call to the accountant. After some small talk and catching up, he apologized, but informed me that my appointment was going to cost a bit more than it did last year. He cited the general state of the economy, the fact that his rent has gone up and that even his printer paper was more expensive now. In all honesty, I didn’t really flinch. He’s always done a great job, and everyone is feeling the economic pinch in some way. I’m still happy to be his client.

This prompted me to think that despite the economic crisis, some service businesses still need to consider raising their hourly rates. I wondered: How is it possible to let clients know that your rates are going up, while making sure they remain satisfied clients? I decided to round up some strategies and advice to make this task a little bit easier for business owners and their clients.

Continue Reading …

We founded Iridesco, the parent company of Harvest, in 2003 as a web design and development studio.  In the Spring of 2006, we launched Harvest and soon found that we were better suited for the product business than we were as a studio.  We then transitioned our business to a “software as a service” model.  During those early years of Iridesco, we learned about what it’s like to run a consulting business in design and technology.  That knowledge and experience directly inform how our products are designed, and ensure that we always maintain a great user experience as our top priority (because we can so easily put ourselves in our customers’ shoes).

While we now focus solely on providing the best possible experience in our products for our customers, we continue to think about ways we can help our customers succeed at their businesses outside of the time tracking and invoicing domain.  This is why we’re launching our new column, Small Business 101.

We’ve learned a lot about running our own business through the years.  By reading the blogs kept by various Harvest customers, we know many of you have also learned (and shared) the new ideas and wisdom you’ve gained along the way.   With that in mind, we’re launching this new column to further help and inspire the many organizations and individuals that use Harvest.  As we discover tips and ideas that we think would be useful for any service professional, we’ll round them up and share the thoughts with you.  We want to challenge your business thinking, promote conversations, and help push your business along to that next level, whatever that may be.

If you have any great small business & productivity resources/articles to share with the Harvest community, let us know and we’ll include it in a future installment of our Small Business 101 column!

Now let’s get down to business.  Our first installment is about How to Raise Billing Rates in a Recession.

Our iPhone app has been updated! Get the newest version →

iPhone time tracking is now even easier with a native application which works whether you are online or offline. Built and distributed by Harvest customer, Y Factorial, the app is free to download and available now from the iTunes app store.

As some of you may know, Harvest already supports iPhone time and expense tracking via the iPhone optimized web interface. By using the new native iPhone applications, users will now be able to track and enter time even when they are offline. When they are back online, the application automatically syncs all the offline records back up to the user’s Harvest account.

Thanks again to Y Factorial for doing a great job with this application to complement Harvest’s time tracking capabilities. Let us know what you think!

We wanted to say ‘Hello’ to all our friends and Twitter followers and let you know that we’ve improved the integration between Harvest and Twitter, and  you are now able to start a timer remotely through Twitter.

It’s simple to stop and start a timer, as well as log expenses from anywhere by texting direct message commands to Harvest through Twitter. You can read all about how this works on our Harvest Twitter page. Now you can access Harvest anywhere you can send a text. We’re always looking to hear your ideas and feedback, so send us a tweet or an email and let us know how you are using Harvest.

We’re really excited to announce our latest updates to Harvest: Detailed Time Report + Marking Hours Invoiced.  You can find this new section under Reports > Detailed Time.  The report runs fairly straight-forward: you choose a timeframe, and select any of the options (clients, project or people) and generate the report.  The magic happens on the resulting report.  Some highlights:

• You can filter the result and show just billable hours, non-billable hours, or uninvoiced hours.
• You can mark the hours as invoiced (or reverse it by marking them uninvoiced).
• On the report header, you can quickly see how many uninvoiced, billable hours you have left – and you can click on a button to export all the time entries to Excel or QuickBooks.
• You’ll notice that after you invoice for a project, those hours will automatically be marked as invoiced.

With this latest round of updates, you can now easily check how many billable hours you need to invoice for a client.  One caveat: once you invoice for, say, the entire month of October – Harvest will basically lock that month so your timesheet will not let you edit those entries (if you need to edit the time, all you have to do is to mark those hours as uninvoiced on the Detailed Time Report).

Big thanks to Dee for the latest round of updates to Harvest!

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).

We just added a tool for you to set up a weekly email to remind your staff to submit their timesheets for approval.  Try this out by going to Timesheets > Unsubmitted, and look on the right side.  Click on the button “Edit Reminder” and choose which day you’d like this email to send out.  That’s it – Harvest will send out an email to your staff around 4pm every week on that particular day.

We hope this new feature will help you save some time from administration.  Note that this feature is available for Business Plan only, and you need to be an administrator on the account to see this feature.

Update: this feature now works for Basic plans as well. To see it, please make sure you have Timesheet Approval activated (via Manage > Account Settings), and go to Timesheets > Unsubmitted.

After six years as an art director at the acclaimed graphic design studio, 2×4, Glen Cummings decided to start his own studio.  MTWTF was born earlier this year, in Lower East Side, New York City, and we’re excited to have a fellow NYC business as our latest New Founder.  Aside from running his new business, Glen teaches graphic design at Yale University each week.  How does one man do so much?  You’ll find out in the interview below.  Read on.

Why did you decide to start your own company, and how did you come up with the name?

I’m a list maker. I write down all the things I’d like to do all the time. Since 2002 being an art director at 2×4 was my primary focus. I finally admitted that I either had to stop making my lists, or start doing some of the items on them, and that meant starting my own studio.

The motivation was the same as when I was 18 and moved out of my parent’s house. You learn to cook, clean, pay bills and it eventually becomes clear that you should develop your own community and environment.  I guess they used to say “start your own family”. It’s the same with design studios. Time to set up shop and foster my own.

Every calendar I’ve ever had says the same thing at the top: Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday. Its hard not to think of those calendars as a letterhead of sorts, so MTWTF, seemed like an obvious choice.

Continue Reading …