We have been hearing lots of requests from our customers to make it simpler to import data for Projects, Clients & Contacts, and People into (and export out of) Harvest. Recently we pushed out a series of updates to enable you to do just that.
Click on the Manage tab, and under Projects, Clients, People and Tasks, you’ll notice the new Import/Export button. Choose whatever action you need and just follow the simple set of instructions. More specifically, you can now:
Import projects into and Export projects out of Harvest via a CSV file (a standard spreadsheet format which you can prepare with Excel, Numbers or Google Docs). Note that you can also import projects via Basecamp and Highrise. This will allow you review multiple projects’ information in one spot, and even print it out as an Excel spreadsheet.
Import and Export clients and client contacts via a CSV file.
Import and Export people via a CSV file. Harvest will automatically create an account and email each person of their log in credentials upon import (the email is optional).
Export all active tasks to a CSV file, so that you can see them all within an Excel file, and print out for review.
The new import/export features will make life a lot easier in setting up and managing project and clients easier within Harvest. Kudos to Doug for making this happen!
Thank you all for your feedback and support. Please let us know if you have any questions or thoughts about these updates!
While we spend our days here at Harvest listening to our customers and continually improving our service, we all have outside interests that keep us busy. In honor of the often under-represented activity of the hobby, we’ve decided to host a monthly series called Hobby, beginning next Thursday, February 11th at our New York City office.
We’ll be inviting speakers to talk about their spare-time recreational pursuits, and they’ll be fielding questions from the audience as well. First on deck: a French Horn Player, a Pizza obsess-er, and a breakdancer (we’ll leave it to them to let you know what their day jobs are!).
We hope you’ll join us in exploring how other people spend their spare, but equally valuable, time.
And speaking of time, you’ll need to act fast, as there are only 7 spots left for this first event – RSVP now!
We hosted our first Harvest HQ Potluck Lunch today, and we’re still reeling from the immense amount of homemade goodness! Everyone here has a big love of food, and our shared lunches often involve lively discussions and debates with whomever happens to be around and hungry at the same time. We decided to invite our friends to bring a home cooked dish to share, so we could all sit down together at the same time, and enjoy.
UPDATE: Maintenance is complete and service is back online.
As a hosted software service we need to upgrade our server hardware from time to time. We’ll be taking Harvest and Co-op offline between 1am – 2am EST on Saturday January 30th (what time is this for you?) to upgrade storage on our database systems. Generally this type of maintenance can be planned weeks in advance, however in this case there is hardware which needs to be upgraded proactively to ensure smooth operation of the site.
The maintenance is not expected to last the full hour and is expected to be complete before 2am EST. As always we appreciate your support and patience!
Follow @harvest on Twitter to get real time information about Harvest.
Today we’re launching one of the most requested features for Harvest: the ability to record start and end time on timesheets.
Right now, when you record time in Harvest, you can only put in the duration of a task (such as “1 hour“). With this new feature, instead of typing in the duration, you can put in the start and end time of the task, such as “9am-12pm“. Harvest will then calculate the duration for you and record the start/end times, which are then shown on the timesheets, time reports, and invoices. Here’s a quick demo video of how it works:
To get this started, just go to Manage > Account Settings, click on the Edit Preferences button and turn the feature on under Timesheet timestamps. Once the timestamp feature is enabled, go back to the timesheet’s day view. In place of the duration field, you’ll now notice two new fields for start and end time. Here are some tips on how to use the new fields:
To start the timer: leave the fields blank, or type in the start time and leave the end time blank.
You can type in your time in the following format: 3, 3.15, or 3,15. Type in “a” or “p” for AM/PM. Or leave it blank and let Harvest figure it out.
Type in “.” (period) for the time now.
You can also set a preference for time format (12 hour vs 24 hour) on the Edit Preferences page under Account Settings.
Here are some limitations with the new feature that you should know:
Once you turn on the new feature, it will apply to the entire account. So everyone on your Harvest account will see the new start/end time fields.
Unfortunately, you will not be able to put in start/end time via any 3rd party tools (such as the Harvest Widget or iPhone app). You can still use those tools – and if you start a timer on your iPhone, Harvest will still record the start and end times. But if you add a duration on a widget or iPhone, there won’t be any timestamps saved.
The Week View will not be editable once you turn on timestamps.
We’re really excited about this new feature for Harvest Timesheets, and we hope you find it useful! Kudos to Barry for making this long-awaited feature live.
Thank you all for your feedback and support. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback!
Design Vetica is an interactive design agency based in Vancouver, British Columbia. The principal players in the company are 16- and 17-year-old high school students, who are juggling client meetings and final exams in order to grow their business. We talked with David Kim, a partner at Design Vetica, about running their own show, managing their money with Harvest, and what’s next for the fledgling company.
Here at Harvest, we’ve been shocked by the news of the devastation in Haiti due to an earthquake just a few short days ago. We’ve all seen the images and stories of the disaster, and all of us wanted to reach out and help in some way. We were overwhelmed by the options available of where to donate, and so we thought we’d share how we went about our donations.
Our datacenter has notified us they will be performing vital network equipment maintenance between 2am – 4am EST on Tuesday January 19th (what time is that for you?). During the 2 hour window there may be short intervals when the maintenance affects Harvest and Co-op servers and the application is taken offline. We expect any outages to be limited to 15-20 minute windows.
Thanks for your patience and support!
UPDATE: The maintenance has been completed and all systems are back online.
Many people assume that under the hood there are mystical unicorns and magical elves powering Harvest, but the reality is that we simply use regular servers in a datacenter to bring our applications to you. No elves involved. Anyone who has ever had to look after more than a few servers knows that getting all the servers into line is a bit like herding cats, and can be time consuming. It’s always important to know exactly what state your server configurations are in, and usually very important to know that all servers are in the same configuration state at all times.
It’s no secret that many of the fine folks who work on Harvest are Ruby experts (and thus quite easy on the eye). So when looking around at tools we could use to make our servers simpler to manage, we decided to try Chef. If you are not familiar with Chef, it comes from the folks at Opscode and is a powerful tool to manage server configurations, and perform common system administration tasks on a set of servers. Chef is written in Ruby and allows you to accomplish a fair amount of your system administration tasks by writing Ruby recipes to execute on remote servers. Chef makes system administration a bit more like application programming, in a sense.
While we work on getting Chef into daily use, and indeed while we improve our systems platform in general, we plan to share some of our experiences with Harvest users and readers of this blog. You can read up on some of the details of how we got Chef up and running quickly, a little look at how a Chef cookbook, recipe and role work together and we plan to bring you some more details in future posts. We’d love to hear from any Harvest users who are using Chef, or doing interesting systems or server management work (and invoicing clients via Harvest, naturally). What systems projects have you been working on?
Though Harvest Headquarters are located in New York City, a few members of the team are located in different parts of the world, across the U.S. and Europe. Over the years, we have learned a thing or two about communicating efficiently over time and space. These tips are likely to be appropriate for all teams using electronic communication, but their value is magnified when drop-ins and phone calls are not an option. Continue Reading »
Software should be easy to use. We are a design-driven web-based software company with a focus on providing the best user experience in our applications so our customers spend more time on what's important: taking care of business.
