Harvest for +500 clients

I’ve found that there are several pain points when trying to scale up with Harvest. How many active users and projects do you have? If you are using the API to manage clients, projects, and users, then you might not have too many problems if your primary goal is having a way for users to enter time. However, the “managing” of lots of clients/project/users in Harvest is pretty challenging, since most of the user interfaces don’t scale very well.

We are not planning to use time tracking. We would use Harvest to create, send and follow up invoices. To send follow ups on unpaid invoices, add notes to invoices and to get an overview of outstanding invoices etc. We would only have a few products and will create an invoice manually once in a while. All the rest would work through the API. Just see it as hooking up Harvest to a job board where for every new submitted job an invoice needs to be created. The concept of ‘active’ clients is not clear to me. We have a lot of returning customers so every client is active.

Regarding “active”, harvest let’s you archive clients and projects, so they don’t show up in the UI anywhere (making some of the scaling issues more manageable). The invoicing features in Harvest are nice (although invoice customization is limited), and certainly can be automated via the API. When you do manually invoice, it will be a pain selecting your client from a drop-down list of 500 clients. Also, invoice search & reporting features in Harvest are quite limited. I’ve heard of others who use Harvest for timesheets and do invoicing in Xero.

Thanks for your honest replies Jim! Will be looking into other solutions.

Sure thing. Also, keep in mind that there are improvements happening in Harvest that are making some of these things better. The new reports have text autocomplete features — this means that you won’t have to select from a drop-down of 500 clients, someday, once this feature makes its way to the invoicing tool. Also, the reports feature has been improving a lot. Presumably, the invoicing reports will be improving in the future.

If I were you, I’d definitely try out Harvest to see if it meets your needs. And, do realize, that my interests in giving Harvest some “tough love” (in the form of honest, critical feedback here in the forums) is to apply some pressure to the Harvest team to let them know that these are important areas to improve (since our company has many clients/projects/users) . I do love Harvest and like the direction they are headed with their improvements.