Town Square

Whats the best way to set up projects that are project fee based?

Hi- I’ve just started setting up in Harvest. We are a project fee based firm, but we track employees hours to a project, and have an approximated total budgeted hours assigned to each project.
I would love for the reports to give me good data on the profitability of a project, accounting for the different hourly rates of employees (broken out from salaries) and expenses for a project. So if this is the case, should our projects be set up as total budgeted hours? or total budgeted fees?
we are not using harvest to estimate and invoice, only using it as an internal tracking system. So all the rates and hours input in are our true costs and budgets.
thanks for your help!
Bethany

Estimate & Archiving them

What I am finding is that Harvest is great for estimates but you have no way to archive them.

I need to archive them as it tells me which one’s I’ve invoiced for.

Is there any plan to add this in?

Good day.

Hi all,

Just saying howdy from Down Under in sunny Sydney.

I’m a new Harvest user – after flirting with the trial, and getting close to signing up to ‘Paymo’, I decided to go with Harvest – great tool and I really like the ethos/vibe of the guys behind it.

Couple of small things I’d love to see changed/fixed but overall I’m super happy!

Be great to discuss any burning issues of the day with other Harvest users from around the globe :)

Cheers!

Matt Bachle
www.gradecreative.com

Synchr is $99 per month?! Yikes!

Harvest folks,

I like Harvest, and unfortunately, I have to use Quickbooks Online. One of the reasons I chose Harvest, was that Synchr (in beta at the time), promised a $20/month continuing fee.

That’s all changed now — they now want to charge $99 for their syncing service between Harvest and QuickBooks Online! That is atrociously high!!

Harvest, you MUST develop and support your own middle layer, because I for one, cannot afford to use Harvest if it means I need to buy a $99 interface service, which costs more than Harvest AND Quickbooks put together!!

A happy user, who just got sticker shock.

BlackBerry Support on the Horizon?

Hi everyone,

We have just started to use Harvest and so far are really impressed by the ease of use and the numerous interfaces for getting our time into Harvest.

It’s great that there are the typical first round apps for Android and iPhone, but what about BlackBerry?

When I searched the forum, there was a discussion in May of 2010(!) and you indicated back then that you would be making it easier for BlackBerry users to get their time into Harvest.

Has there been any additional discussion around this? Has interest from the community simply died down? Or is it just not the cool thing to build?

Great product and looking forward to the new year using it.

Regards,

Lance

List of new features

Is there a place to see a list of new features and changes after a deployment? I see changes in the UI and some new buttons, and would like to be notified when new things come out (so we can play with them :) )

Jim

The Years-Per-Feature Saga: Is Harvest under-capitalized?

There have been several instances of Harvest feature development being assigned a time frame that’s measured in years, while these things might be accomplished in months — or in some cases, possibly weeks.

A single line of CSS for changing from a mono-spaced font takes more than a year? No, of course not. But when a company is stuck in linear thinking and processes, a real problem arises when the development plan has a huge backlog. Even the small two-minute things end up taking years to happen.

You have a limited number of developers, and a huge number of pending features… so, naturally, progress will be slow. As more feature requests come in — often driven by features seen at other services — that backlog will only grow.

It’s good that the company is good at sticking to a plan or schedule… but when features that are vital to many customers are available form Harvest’s competitors now, while Harvest says those features will arrive sometime in the next year or two (or are not even scheduled for development), one has to wonder what’s going on.

So, Harvest, I’ll say it again— I’d say you’re under-capitalized.

I’m certainly no serial entrepreneur, but it’s not hard to see the pattern.

If you don’t raise development capital, you’re going to fall farther and farther behind. While you might be able to retain some core customer base, your growth is going to be severely limited by not having the features that your competitors already have, and which customers want and need.

Capital will provide additional development staff or vendor hours. Features will be developed in parallel, not in single-file fashion. You will move forward, and retain the customers who are clamoring for things they can find elsewhere. While there are many companies that can tell you that throwing money and coders at a problem won’t necessarily help (witness Microsloth), there’s a balance that has to be maintained.

I’ve seen this happen with a web hosting company I’ve been with for… 10 years now, I think.

Wonderful people. Super conscientious, super communicative, truly wizard-like staff. The service is incredibly reliable.

Their business model is one of slow, manageable growth, and that can be a valid choice. But over those 10 years, the value proposition has changed radically. Competitors now have so much more to offer in terms of control panel features and tools for resellers — not to mention larger capacities per dollar — that I’m forced to move, in order to provide my clients with what they need — and have come to expect — from a hosting service.

If a company does good things for me and is run by good people, I can have a fierce sense of loyalty to it. But at some point, business priorities win out, and a move must be made.

I think I’m fairly safe in saying that if Harvest doesn’t cap-up and build out faster, there’s a solid chance the company’s growth will plateau, and then decline — much faster than those of you at the company might ever have thought.

It’s time for those at the top to start thinking more big-picture. Otherwise, all this talk of feature requests and timelines will be moot.

No one from Harvest made any comment the last time I posted about this. I’d like to know what you think.

…Bob

Bob West

Problem loading pages

When moving between Time Sheet and Estimates, upon returning to time sheet the page does not load completely. I have to refresh to get “edit” and delete buttons to appear while hovering over them and the drop downs to appear correctly again until refreshed.
Anybody have this problem?
I think it is probably a setting or plug-in but can’t figure out which.

PeachTree integration

Hello,

I was wondering if the integration of Peachtree and Harvest is on the horizon or possible.

Thanks!

Reviews request

My name is John Tuttle and I have been testing out Harvest for use in our 35+ user agency. We are a combination of creatives, communicators, and strategic thinkers.

I am looking for feedback from existing Harvest users, specifically users in the Twin Cities if you’re out there.

Thanks!