Craft, Quality and Iconic Design

Keeping the Operation Running Smoothly

By 2005, Mike Buzzard, Michael Schmidt and Toke Nygaard were running a successful agency, but were spending too much time on the details of running the business rather than on the creative work they set out to do. The core of the problem was time, specifically capturing time, understanding how time was used and getting paid for their time.

Cuban Council works with the best minds in their industry, touting 13 employees working from 4 different locations as a distributed team. Mike confesses, “it would be great if you could just holler across the studio and say, ‘OK everyone, do your timesheets.’”

As a professional services company, Cuban Council is dependent on time tracking to keep the operation running smoothly. In addition to their core group of employees, they have a contractor network that, at any given time, swells their work force from between 4 and 20 additional people. They need to be able to estimate projects costs for their clients, project earnings and utilization, and to be able to pay their contractors accurately.

“ ...it would be great if you could just holler across the studio and say, ‘OK everyone, do your timesheets.’ ”

Finding Harvest

After conducting an exhaustive search of all tools available in the market, the partners almost gave up and decided it was best to build their own system. Most tools were poorly designed and not user-friendly. However, while searching for online solutions, they discovered Harvest and realized it aligned exactly with what they wanted to build.

They were immediately attracted to Harvest because it is “utility driven and design focused,” and they have grown to rely on the ever-evolving set of Harvest features, like project budget reporting. Cuban Council has taken full advantage of these additions, as they themselves have been growing, taking on more projects, and hiring additional staff.

Adopting Harvest as a Team

Transitioning from their old system was, as Mike describes it, “a relief. In the past, we hand produced all of our invoices and used a spreadsheet to log hours.” It was a long and tedious way of getting things done, a process that Harvest automated, giving them more time to focus on the work they love.

Tara Cyphers oversees Cuban Council’s business development and project management, and joined the company shortly after they began using Harvest. She quickly became a power user and fan, and appreciated Harvest’s attention to design, explaining, “I loved that it wasn’t 1998 looking.”

Occasionally Tara conducts research on productivity software for the office and “has seen everything out there. I’ve just never found anything that feels as nice as Harvest. It's so simple to use; to add new people, assign new projects, create tasks, etc. It is just easy to use, which ultimately is a time saver.”

For Cuban Council, Harvest is about more than tracking time and billing clients, it’s about managing a geographically diverse team. Tara has created a list of non-billable tasks to manage the team’s time, including travel, sick days, company holidays and paid time off.

Cultural Shift in Office

Mike explains, “People loathe doing timesheets, (but) Harvest makes timesheets as close to enjoyable as it could possibly be. It’s painless and easy. In fact, many of our contractors have adopted Harvest for their own freelance businesses.” Employees track time in whatever way works best for them: some start timers via Harvest’s mobile device, while others use the weekly timesheet from the web view to enter in their time at the end of the week.

“ People loathe doing timesheets, (but) Harvest makes timesheets as close to enjoyable as it could possibly be. It’s painless and easy. ”

With its easy to use format and clean design, Harvest is a system which has gained full adoption by the entire Cuban Council team. It frees up their time so that they can focus on their creative work, while continuing to push the boundaries of design.