The HARVEST Blog

We have been making a lot of improvements to the new Harvest Timesheet. Today, I wanted to show power users the fastest way to use it.

Knowing just a few simple keyboard shortcuts, you can start a timer or enter time without ever having to use a mouse. See it in action:

• ‘n‘ to open up the new entry form,
• Use tab to move between the form elements,
• ‘esc‘ to cancel out of the form,
• If you are tracking time via duration, we accept a variety of formats (1.2 = 1 hour and 12 minutes) and simple time math.
• If you are using timestamps, we understand “11.25″ or “1125″ (faster than typing 11:25) or “9a”, short for 9:00am.

We’re starting out with a limited and simple set of shortcuts, and we’d love to hear what shortcuts you’d like to see for the timesheet!

The good folks at Fog Creek have received over 1900 votes to build time tracking into Trello, their project management application. With that much enthusiasm, it only made sense for us to bring time tracking into Trello, Harvest-style. Today, we’re very excited to announce that you can now use the Harvest Chrome Extension to track time right from your Trello account.

Track Time in Trello

Harvest is already the fastest and easiest way to track time, and our integration with Trello goes one step further in making it accessible anywhere and everywhere. Curious? Watch the Harvest Chrome Extension in action.

Here are some great reasons to use the extension:

• Track time without leaving Trello – You can track time right from your Trello cards, so you can focus on the task at hand.
• See the time spent on each card – Each Trello card shows how much time  has been spent on it, so you know exactly where your time is going.
• Get all the benefits of Harvest – In Harvest, you can easily turn the time tracked from Trello into reports and invoices. We’ve got all your needs covered.

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Today, we’re excited to give developers an easy way to add a seamless time tracking experience right into their applications. Introducing the Harvest Platform.

Traditionally, integrations between applications have required tedious API calls and database changes. With the new Harvest Platform, adding time tracking to a project management, issue tracking or task management application is as easy as embedding a few lines of JavaScript and HTML. Developers can now focus on the core functionality of their apps while easily harnessing Harvest for time tracking, reporting and invoicing.

Background

Over the last 6 years of building Harvest, we’ve received countless requests to integrate with various applications. The reason is simple: users want to simplify their daily workflows. Our customers use Harvest in conjunction with project management or issue tracking applications and they crave a tight integration between the apps.

For the application developers, many are reluctant to add time tracking on top of their product’s core focus. They know that time tracking is just scratching the surface of the true customer need. Once time is captured, customers need to run reports and send invoices based on that time.

With these reasons in mind, we’ve created the Harvest Platform. It’s an extremely easy way for developers to enable time tracking in their application while offloading time tracking, reporting and invoicing to Harvest.

A first-class user experience

To see the type of experience the platform can enable, take a look at the first application to take advantage of the platform: Do by Salesforce. Do is a social productivity tool that helps people work together on shared tasks and projects.

Using the Harvest Platform, the Do team has enabled time tracking by including a timer button with each Do task. When you click the button, the Harvest Platform modal window opens, and it already knows about the Do project and task details and the user simply enters any additional notes and tracks time. The user never needs to leave the Do application for time tracking.

Do.com shown here using the Harvest Platform integration to bring time tracking to their tasks. If you wish to request early access to this integration on Do, simply create a Do account (if you don’t have one already) and email the Do team. 

Implementation in 15 minutes

As developers know, integrations between applications can often be a cumbersome development effort. With the Harvest Platform, we worked hard to make sure it’s incredibly easy to use for any developer. Implementation involves only adding JavaScript and HTML to your code. There are no APIs or data models to worry about.

If you’re a developer, head to the Harvest Platform page to learn more. If you have a favorite application which you wish had time tracking, let them know about this new effortless way to add time tracking right into their application.

We are very excited to announce version 2.0 of Harvest for iPhone today! This version is almost a complete re-write of the application with an eye towards speed, reliablity, and a better user experience.

The user interface is based on the beautiful design of our Mobile Timesheets page, which includes some powerful usability enhancements like slide-in navigation and the ability to stop a timer directly from the Timesheets view.

The new application internals have borrowed heavily from the lessons learned from our successful Harvest for Mac app. We believe you’ll notice this as a faster, more reliable experience in version 2.0. In addition, this new architecture lays the groundwork for future updates, meaning we’ll be able to incorporate new features and fixes that much faster.

We’ve got a long list of updates in this release, but here are a few highlights:

• We’ve added support for logging in via Google Apps, for those of you who have linked your Harvest account to your Google Apps account.
• The new Team Status view is a great screen for admins who want to know what their team is working on.
• You can now create projects, clients, and tasks while offline.

(The full list of improvements in this version is included at the bottom of this post.)

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Since Monday night, the flooding and power outages caused by Hurricane Sandy have severely affected our availability. Harvest’s primary datacenter is located in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. The building is home to Google’s NY operations and a major datacenter in the north eastern U.S. While flooding has not affected our datacenter, the power outages in New York City, despite backup generators, have caused repeated issues.

Our team has been working around the clock to keep Harvest available. This post is to keep you informed of our current status and share the details of this event with you thus far.

Current Status

Saturday, Nov 3rd 7:00am ET – At approximately 5:52PM ET on Friday Nov 2nd, Harvest became unavailable due to problems related to the restoration of commercial power in the datacenter. The Harvest team worked through the night to safely restore service after the transition back to commercial power. By 7:00am ET, Harvest service is once again accessible to all customers. We thank you for the extra patience during this weekend evening which allowed us to restore our service properly. With commercial power in place at the data center, we take a big step towards stable conditions.

Thursday, Nov 1st 1:45pm ET – We continue to operate normally on backup generators with plenty of fuel at the datacenter. Based on ConEd’s latest estimate, they expect power to be restored in lower Manhattan by Saturday.

Wednesday, Oct 31st 7:30pm ET – Harvest experienced intermittent network issues from approximately 6:17pm ET till about 7:00pm ET. During this time, some customers were not able to access Harvest. The network issues were resolved at the datacenter and service should be 100% accessible at this time.

Wednesday, Oct 31st 12:30pm ET – Harvest is available and operating normally. Due to the power outage in lower Manhattan, all services are still powered by backup generators. Our datacenter has ample fuel and the ability to refuel as needed. To minimize downtime for our customers, we will continue to operate as-is and monitor the situation closely. Based on a statement from Con Edison (the power company in New York City), it will take an estimated 3 more days before commercial power is restored in lower Manhattan. We will provide updates if and when estimates change.

In the meantime, we have a backup plan in place to migrate our services should we need to (more details on that below). Note that all data continues to be safely backed up on-site and off-site in several locations during this time.

Please also note that you can always check our status at http://harveststatus.com

What’s Been Happening

Around 11:35pm ET on Monday, Oct 29th, Harvest went offline due to a power outage in our datacenter. During this time, datacenter staff worked to restore power and network connectivity. By 6:25am ET on Tuesday, Oct 30th, service had been restored. Harvest continued to operate on backup power generators during this time. Harvest operated normally for the rest of Oct 30th.

At 5:48am ET on Tuesday, Oct 31st, Harvest experienced a second outage window due to power failures in neighboring datacenters. This caused network connection problems which made Harvest unreachable by customers. By 7:00am ET, network paths had been re-routed and made Harvest accessible to most customers again. By 9:00am ET, all known network issues were resolved and Harvest became accessible for all customers.

Contingency Plan

While our core datacenter issues were being addressed, our team has been working tirelessly to ensure that we can reliably serve Harvest from a different datacenter if necessary. After around the clock efforts led by Harvester Warwick Poole to deploy and test the setup in a new datacenter, with support provided by our entire team, we are ready to take this step if necessary.

In the event of another extensive outage, we will immediately begin to switch service to a new datacenter located in Dallas, Texas. We expect this move to take approximately 2 hours, during which time Harvest will not be available. Should we need make the switch, we will alert all account owners via email and provide information through Twitter and harveststatus.com.

Thank You

Thanks to all our customers for the understanding and overwhelming support sent our way during this crisis. We couldn’t be more proud to have you good people as our customers. We will continue to do our best to provide service to you during this challenging time. If you have any concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us at support@harvestapp.com.

While working on a different post today, I realized that we’ve never formally talked about Kaizen, our internal project management/bug tracker/feature request tracker. Sure, we’ve mentioned it in passing a number of times, but we’ve never given you a behind the scenes peek at what Kaizen looks like.

“Kaizen” is a Japanese word meaning “improvement” and refers to a philosophy of continuous improvement of process. It’s the perfect name for a tool that contributes so deeply to the improvement of our products, ourselves and the work we do. In a lot of ways, Kaizen (app) is the embodiment of The Harvest Way: listen to our customers, make it simpler, make it faster, be honest and keep improving.

Kaizen as a project/task manager:

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Today, we’re happy to announce our newest payment gateway integration, Stripe. Adding Stripe as a supported gateways was a highly requested feature and we’re excited and proud to have made it possible.

Harvest Web Invoices have always made it easy and fast to get paid, allowing clients to view the invoice and submit online payment from the same page. Now, integrating with Stripe makes it even faster. You clients only need to complete four fields to send a payment: name, credit card number, security code, and expiration date. View the live invoice below and see for yourself:

Configuration is as simple as linking your Stripe account in Invoices > Configure > Online Payments > Payment Gateways. Once your account is linked, you’re ready to begin accepting payments online. For more information about payment gateway configuration, check out our Help Docs.

And don’t forget — you can pair Stripe with Harvest’s fast invoice creation process and automatic recurring invoice reminders to help ensure you get paid for all your hard work.

Thanks to everyone who reached out and expressed interest in this feature. If you weren’t accepting online payments before – now is a great time to start.

Don’t have a Harvest account? Sign up for a free trial and start collecting payments online!

A few weeks ago I downloaded MyFitnessPal to my iPhone. During the 2 weeks that I actually used it (don’t judge!) I noticed something about my behavior. Specifically, being hyper aware of my choices, actually changed the way I consumed food and the way I chose to spend my down time. I started bringing lunch and started exiting the subway a few stops earlier in order to lengthen my walk to work.

If you’ve ever used Mint or any other budgeting apps, you may have experienced the same phenomenon. Understanding where your money goes makes you much more aware before you spend it. You end up being more focused. It might even inspire you to create a budget for yourself and stick to it.

While using MyFitnessPal, I realized that the relationship I was developing with this fitness app was similar to the one I have with Harvest. Since joining Harvest more than a year ago, I have found that entering time as I go has a huge personal benefit. Sure, it’s faster and it ensures that the time data is accurate, but the real benefit for me is that it helps me manage my time more efficiently. The act of starting a timer makes me more focused. It is the equivalent of making a declaration about what I’m about to do.

Even though Harvest has more than 10 ways for you to enter time as you go, many of you still enter at the end of the day, week or even, month. If you’re one of those people, I’d recommend you give track-as-you-go a try. It may seem awkward at first, but it becomes second nature rather quickly. Give it a day. And if you take me up on this challenge, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

In certain instances, Harvest locks time entries against further edits in order to protect the integrity of the data. In each case, a small grey or green lock icon appears beside the entry. Hovering your mouse over the lock icon will reveal why the entry is locked. In all cases, administrators in the account can still edit the notes and duration of a locked entry.

In this post, I’ll explain each of the three cases when Harvest locks time entries.

When an entry is invoiced

When an invoice is created in Harvest based on time and expenses, the entries connected to that invoice are locked against further edits. Along with the specific time entries, the timeframe for the invoiced project is also locked against further entries. This is done to ensure that all billable time for a project has been included on the invoice for that timeframe.

In a detailed time report, invoiced entries are marked with a green lock icon.

To unlock an invoiced entry, you can create a detailed time report for the necessary timeframe and then mark those entries as uninvoiced.

When a record is archived

Each time entry in Harvest has four important records associated with it: a client, a project, a task and the person that made the entry. Whenever one of these records is archived, the time entries associated with it are locked against further edits.

In timesheets or detailed time reports, locked entries are marked with a grey lock icon.

To unlock an entry containing an archived record, you’ll need to reactivate the record(s) associated with it, depending on where it’s been archived (either within a project’s settings or for the whole account under the Manage screen.)

When a timesheet is approved

The last instance where time entries are locked is when all time entries for that week are submitted for approval by the user and then approved by a project manager or administrator.

In timesheets or detailed time reports, locked entries are marked with a grey lock icon.

To unlock an approved timesheet, a project manager or administrator can view the timesheet under Timesheets > Archive and click the Withdraw Approval button.

More help

For more help with Harvest, be sure to check out our Getting Started info and help documentation at http://getharvest.com/help/.

This morning was the worst outage Harvest has experienced in many years and we are embarrassed. Our customers expect the best from Harvest and there is no excuse for failing in this way. Here’s what happened and how we are proceeding.

The summary of the issue is that sudden high traffic volume started to overwhelm our load balancers, firewalls and then our clustering tools. The effects lasted for 2 hours. It took us some time to find the core problems and put emergency resolution in place. Read on for a more technical description.

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