Jim Kring

The question does make sense. I need this, too, and posted about it, here: I need Assignable Tasks or Bill by Person Task Hourly Rate

+15 for our office.

It’s not possible, yet, but it’s been requested by others: http://forum.getharvest.com/forums/feature-requ...

We use the Uninvoiced Report for seeing which clients/projects to invoice. Since we have a lot of projects, it would be helpful if there were a way to hide projects that have zero uninvoiced hours/amount. This would make it visually easy to see that there were no uninvoiced hours/amounts without having to scroll down the page.

Sometimes I’ll create an invoice outside of normal business hours (e.g. on the weekend), but I want to send the invoice during business hours (e.g. Monday morning). I’d like to set the issue date and then hit the Send button, but have it be more like a “Queue for Send” — then, when the send day/time arrives, the invoice will be automatically sent.

(+1) me too

(+1) I requested this about 1.5 years ago and haven’t seen any traction, yet. IMO, there are a handful of client settings that should be kept with the client (default hourly rate, Net payment terms, etc.). I’d even settle for a “Notes” field for each client, where I could keep this info handy. Until then, a work-around is to find and duplicate the last project for that client. But, this is even a bit of a chore.

Me too. Whenever I bill for expenses, I’d like to be able to attach expense receipts.

That’s perfect, Barry. Thanks for the hint. FWIW, I think that the Expense Tracking API should include, or at least link to the page that describes, how to report on expenses. Thanks!

I looked at the Expense Tracking API and I don’t see a way to get a list of all expenses for a project over a time period. Is this possible? Thanks.

When a project is budgeted by total dollars, rather than total hours, the uninvoiced hours are not shown in the project report — it only shows the uninvoiced dollars. It would be nice to see the uninvoiced hours, too.

I love the new Uninvoiced Report — it’s going to save us tons of time and money.

One improvement I’d like to see on this page is the ability to invoice by individual projects, rather than invoice by client (for all projects). Currently, there’s an “Invoice” button for each Client (which then takes you to the Create Invoice page where every project is selected — and you have to unselect the other projects), but there’s no way to easily invoice for a single project (and we NEVER invoice for several projects at a time — an invoice is only for one project).

I know that there’s a work-around, but it adds a couple extra steps with the possibility of mistakes. We’ve got about 20 active projects and about 10 active clients. Even if there’s a small chance of making a mistake, they do happen (since there are so many projects to invoice) and they are costly, when they happen.

Thanks,

(+1) me to.

@Jeff: I’ve mentioned this before, in the context of reporting on invoices by project (here). You might want to add your +1 to that thread, too :)

@henning: there’s been a bit of discussion of internal vs. external bill rates. Here’s one such thread: http://forum.getharvest.com/forums/feature-requ... — you might want to add your +1 there, too :)

Hi Matthew: Thanks for the update on the support for incremental rounding in the various reports — that’s going to be very helpful. I’ll take a look and see if this addresses all my concerns with using this feature.

I have one customer, for whom we have about 5 active projects and 20 archived projects. When I am searching for a project, I find that the archived projects clutter up the search results and I’d like to be able to easily filter them out, or have them filtered out by default with an option to show them.

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.

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.

bump!

Great idea. There’s another discussion thread for something similar, here: http://forum.getharvest.com/forums/feature-requ...

bump!

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.

@michellem: here’s an existing topic about this great idea: http://forum.getharvest.com/forums/feature-requ...

Just a thought… I’d love to be able to save a report and configure it to be re-run and emailed periodically (with configurable frequency and email addresses).

Hey Ben: That’s interesting that you’re using Jira for project management. We’re starting to use FogBugz for that and have been thinking about ways we can bridge FB and Harvest. Regarding PO management in Harvest, I’d really love a simple solution that allows me to add POs to projects (and have the project $ budget dynamically determined by the sum of the POs) and then have a drop-down list of POs to choose from when I create an invoice against the project. Right now, I use the Project Notes field to keep track of POs that are added to the project and increment the project budget. I guess I could create a little desktop app that uses the Harvest API to store data in the Project Notes field and then modify the project budget. Actually, this makes me think of another idea — it would be cool if we could create tags to store extra data about projects, invoices, etc. This would give API/tools developers a nice place to store additional, persistent meta-data that’s used programmatically.

@Ben: One more thing that I’d mention about what we’re doing. We’ve started to use QuickBase to manage customer POs. We built a little database app that allows us to relate Invoices to POs (which relate to Projects and Clients, of course). I can then easily generate a report that shows, for a given project, which POs have remaining funds and how much (and calculate hours remaining, based on hourly rate). Also, right now, we are manually entering the number of uninvoiced billable hours for a given project into QuickBase, so that we can take this into consideration when calculating how many hours are available before a PO is depleted. But, we’re thinking of automating that using the web service APIs of QuickBase and Harvest.

@Ben: This is really great info. It’s comforting to know that I’m not alone (we’re a little bit smaller than you, and just now starting to really feel the pain of trying to use Harvest for managing quotes, POs, and invoices — it does invoices pretty OK, but there is a lot to be desired). Have you come up with any automated tools for bridging these three systems?

Hi Shawn. This is really wonderful news! I can’t wait to see it.

FogBugz has some time tracking features, which are nice for estimating task time and logging time spent working on tasks. Also, FogBugz has a plugin for firing URL Triggers on various events, including Time Interval Events. It would be cool to bridge this into Harvest, to allow creating time entries associated with time intervals in FogBugz. Has anyone tried this?

(+1) I’d like this, too.

(+1) I would like to have a lot more traceability here, too.

(+1) I like this idea. I would attach purchase orders to projects (at least until purchase orders are implemented as a first class feature)

(+1) This is one of my biggest pain points in Harvest right now.

(+1) we negotiate different payment terms (Net 30, Net 45, Net 60) with each customer. Sometimes we even negotiate a discount for early payment. It’s a huge pain, now, to go look up what the negotiated payment terms are for the customer in question.

Hi rubendel, My work-around is to ALWAYS copy myself on the email when an invoice is sent. That way I have a copy of the original invoice PDF in my email archives.

(+1) YES!!! Managing purchase orders in harvest is a real pain (I want them to auto-populate for invoices against a certain project). And, there’s no feature for reporting on purchase orders (seeing which invoices reference a PO and how much total dollars have been invoiced and how much is remaining on the PO). I’ve talked about this at length here.

(+1) for me too. I’d also love to be able to store some comments and/or history for each client. I want to be able to see the current rate we are charging them, plus a historical record of rate increases.

(+1) please add my name to the list, too. As you’re working on it, I’d also love the ability to have a default internal rate for a contractor, but to be able to override it on a project-by-project basis, if possible.

(+1) I’d appreciate the time savings of both (A) including the message content in the emails and (B) having the link navigate to the correct page.

Note: I see that an Invoice that adds funds to a retainer has an link to the retainer at the top of it. Only the invoices that draw funds from the retainer are missing the link/description at the top. So, is this a feature request or a bug report?

I’ve created a paradox — a search for “invoice bug” in the Harvest forums now returns 1 result :)

The “Search the Forum” feature does seem to support multiple search terms. If I search for two words by typing “invoice bug”, then it will only return topics that have instances of “invoice bug” and not any results for “invoice” and “bug”. This makes it really hard to find stuff. I’ve started just using Google to search for stuff in the harvest forums by using the site:forum.getharvest.com modifier.

For example:

search for “invoice bug” and it returns 0 results

search for “invoice bug site:forum.getharvest.com” on google and you get about 4 pages worth

I just created an invoice against a retainer. I noticed that its status was immediately “Paid”. And, when I look in the list of Invoices, it’s way down on the bottom with all the other paid invoices. Now, what feels broken to me is that this invoice was never actually sent to the customer. So, I now want to send the customer the invoice along with a comment that it’s a draw against the retainer and that no payment is due. However, Harvest doesn’t seem to have any feature that makes it easy for me to send this sort of notification. In fact, since Harvest automagically marks the email as paid (and I can’t unmark it as paid) there’s no way for me to “Send Invoice”. All I can do is “Send Thank-You”. I don’t really want to send a Thank-You note to my customer for a payment — they didn’t make a payment. I generated an invoice for which no payment is due. The worklow seems a bit broken to me.

If I’m looking at an invoice that relates to a retainer (because it either adds funds to it or it draws funds from it), I expect to find some kind of link to the retainer. But, there’s no link, nor any indication about which retainer it’s related to.

I recommend adding some kind of link to the retainer.

There is a major (IMO) usability bug in Harvest in that it allows you to archive a project that has uninvoiced time, while also not allowing you to invoice the time entries of an archived project. The end result is that it’s very easy for billable time to go uninvoiced and slip through the cracks, resulting in possible significant loss of revenue.

This should be fixed by either:

A) Preventing (or at a minimum, notifying) users from archiving a project if it has uninvoiced billable hours.

B) Allowing users to invoice for time entries of an archived project.

Thanks,

I’ll add that the Code of Federal Regulations Title 19 141.86 Contents of invoices and general requirements states that the invoice number and page number should be at the bottom of every page.

When managing projects, the project creation date is shown, but it would also be helpful to see the date that the project was archived.

Hi Barry,

A few points, in response to your “to protect the health of Harvest” argument:

- The harvest API already has throttling built into it.

- I can still get at the same data by jumping through hoops, but it requires pulling even more data (all projects or users) from Harvest, in addition to the actual time entries, thus making the load on Harvest even worse

- It’s possible to implement a “paging” system that only returns data in clumps (pages of 50 records at a time, for example) — this already happens, I think, when getting time entries via the time tracking API (as opposed to the reporting API)

- If the reporting API provided more rich server-side queries (like letting me report on the total uninvoiced time for a specific project, or get a list of projects with uninvoiced time), then it would obviate the need for me to pull all the data and do a client-side crunch on it.

- If harvest’s web UI had the features I needed, then I wouldn’t have to write my own code to do this.

:)

Thanks,

-Jim

You’re welcome, Shawn. Thanks for taking my tough love in good spirit — I think that solving these big/tough problems could be a great opportunity for Harvest.

And, improved permissions will be great is eagerly awaited! Just yesterday, we had a junior engineer (a new hire) approving timesheets (bad), because we made him a PM of a few projects only so that he could be able to add/remove other engineers to/from the project easily (good). As we grow, it gets harder and harder to communicate our “conventions” (work arounds to feature limitations) to everyone in the company. This leads to lots of problems like the one I just described.

Thanks, again, for your dedication to creating an ever-better product.

-Jim

Hi Barry: Thanks for the tips. I’ll play around with this and let you know what I come up with. As a suggestion, it would be nice if we could get at the reporting via the API and slice and dice the data any way we choose, without having to specify a project or user (which requires iterative over projects or users, respectively).

Hi Barry,

It works! No problem.

OK, it was my bad. There was a bug in my code that was causing the URL to be malformed. However, when I typed the correct URL into my browser, Harvest returned a “We can’t find the page you’re looking for.” page, so I figured that maybe it was something wrong with the API.

Thanks,

-Jim

Hi @Samara,

I agree that this use case applies well to the Detailed Time report. In fact, it should already be possible, except (I feel) there is a bug in the Detailed Time report in that the Person and Hours fields (unlike the Timeframe, Client, and Project fields) “forget” their current value when you select “Create New Report”.

That said, I really need this feature in the summary time report too, so thanks for adding it the feature request list.

The reporting API documented here, is broken:

http://www.getharvest.com/api/reporting#get-use...

Specifically, calling:

GET /people/#{user_id}/entries?from=YYYYMMDD&to=YYYYMMDD

Results in a page not found error. Now, I figured I would poke around and try to see if I can get at the same thing via something like this (which I’m just guessing at by playing with the web UI URLs):

GET /reports/users/#{user_id}?from=YYYYMMDD&to=YYYYMMDD

But, that returns no data.

Am I missing something? Is the Harvest API broken? Did it change, but without an update to the documentation?

When I’m approving a timesheet for a person, I almost always want to view the new (and improved) report for that person for that time period. I would love a quick way to jump (via hyperlink) from the timesheet view to the report view.

Basically, the problem is that when I’m approving timesheets, I really want to know more high level information about what the person was working on (billable vs non-billable, which clients, projects, etc.) and it’s hard to digest that in the timesheet view, since it’s just raw timesheet entries.

OK, I’ve discovered a potential flaw with trying to get unbilled time entries from active projects: a project can be archived before all its time is billed. So, it seems that the best approach is to find all uninvoiced time for some period. However, I don’t see a way to do that for all projects and all people. So, is the most effective mechanism to iterate each user using the /people/#{user_id}/entries? API call?

What’s the easiest way to report on uninvoiced time? Basically, my use case is that I want to know which projects have uninvoiced time for some billing period.

Looking at the API docs, it seems that the best supported route would be to get a list of all projects, and then for each one, get all uninvoiced time entries for the period:

GET /projects/#{project_id}/entries?from=YYYYMMDD&to=YYYYMMDD&only_unbilled=yes

However, another possible way is to try to do a detailed report on time entries for any project, like:

GET /reports/details/32/2011/59/2011/any/any/any/ign/yes/ign/any?only_unbilled=yes

Then, I can just slice and dice the time entries by project to see which projects need to be billed.

However, this latter approach doesn’t seem to work. I don’t get any XML data back.

Thanks for your help brainstorming.

-Jim

I love harvest and think it’s great. However, I’d like to publicly mention that as Harvest helps a company succeed (more clients, more & bigger projects, more employees, etc.), it really starts to fail in many ways:

- I can’t find invoices easy.
- I can’t (really) report on invoices (e.g. by project, PO, etc.)
- I can’t easily look at the same report, but cycle through people.
- I can’t manage my billing rules for many different customers/projects (e.g. fixed cost, billing period, etc.)
- I can’t track customer POs for work (no way to easily manage big T&M projects where customers send multiple POs for the same project)
- I can’t set up recurring invoices that suck in time entries
- I can’t set up recurring expenses
- I can’t set up different roles/permissions aside from Admin & Project Manager.

It’s great that the Harvest team wants to help small businesses track time, but what happens when those small businesses become medium sized businesses? Is the solution for us to spend $30k per year on SAP instead of $1.2k per year on Harvest? It would seem to make good business sense that Harvest should offer more ERP-like features at a higher price to growing firms.

But that’s just my 2 cents.

My suggestion is to put something like “Fixed Cost” in the project name or code. This will give you a good visual indication that the project is fixed cost, so that when you invoice, you can look at the project notes and see what you agreed to bill for the fixed cost milestones. If you want, you revise the hourly bill rate for the project, based on the actual time spent (but, the danger with this is that it changes your revenue generated on an accrual basis, retroactively). The right way to do fixed cost projects IMO is to track some sort of % complete metric and the fixed cost value of the project. I can’t wait until Harvest can do that for me.

(+1) for me, too.

It’s possible via drop-down to change from Week, Month, Quarter, Year. I’d like to be able to easily change from one person to another via drop-down or some other easy way.

Basically, I get a certain view dialed in and then I want to see the same report for a different person. Right now, there’s no easy way.

Another reason that I need this feature is that if we use use Google Apps integration with Harvest, then people have to set their email addresses to be their Google Apps primary domain email address. And, we don’t want this domain (email address) showing up on invoices to customers.

Here’s my problem: We charge a different price for different people, for different tasks and I can’t find a good way to do this in Harvest.

For example, if a senior engineer is coding we charge $X/hr. If a junior engineer is coding we charge $Y/hr. For travel time, we charge 75% of the rate for coding. So, for a senior person, that’s $(X*0.7)/hr and for a junior person it’s $(Y*0.7)/hr. So, that’s a different rate for senior vs. junior for both coding and travelling.

The ideal solution would be to have a billing option for a project called: “person task hourly rate” that let you specify the rate for every person, for every task.

Another solution (and an orthogonal feature) would be to allow assigning tasks to different people and create similar tasks for each person, but with a different bill rate.

But, again, the ideal solution would be to have a “person task hourly rate” billing scheme.

Thanks,

-Jim

I have a project and I want to have several tasks in the project, but be able to assign which users are doing the different tasks.

Benefits:

- This would make it easier for users entering time, so that they only see tasks relevant to them (and don’t accidentally enter time into the wrong task).

- This would allow creating similar tasks that are billed at different rates depending on who is performing the task (using the “task hourly rate” billing method), which is not currently possible.

Thanks,

-Jim

(+1) we need more roles/privileges in harvest, beyond admin and project manager. We need: admin (create/manage users), executive manager (ability to create new clients and assign clients to account managers), account manager (ability to create/edit projects for clients they manage and assign/edit project managers), project managers (ability to edit projects they manage and assign users to the project), finance manager (ability to run reports on all financials, but not create/manage clients, projects, or users), etc.

(+1) Me too! One of our companies biggest headaches is keeping track of when to bill customers. I’d like to be able to specify a billing period for projects and have harvest remind me when I need to submit an invoice (bonus points for creating a draft invoice automatically).

Hi Barry, Thanks for the info. One suggestion (for the docs) is that this info isn’t really related to “authentication” — it’s access “permissions”. And, it’s probably worthy of it’s own section, rather than just a couple sentences buried inside the authentication section.

When calling into the API using a user account that is not an administrator, many of the API calls fail to return data (for example, a regular user tried to get a list of All Clients and it failed to return any data).

Is there any documentation that describes which API calls can be made by different user levels (regular users, project managers, and administrators)?

Also, it would be nice if the API calls had more fine grain permissions. For example, there’s no reason a regular user shouldn’t be able to return a list of clients’ names for projects they are assigned to.

(+1) me too!

@luckman212: I also just noticed that William Mak posted a comment in that previous thread about needing to run Reconciliation Report (comparing time entries to invoices).

luckman212: I just realized that I posted a related question here. After re-reading this, I realize that you actually want three different options when removing a time entry from an invoice: 1) Delete the time entry and remove it from the invoice. 2) Remove the time entry from the invoice and mark it as uninvoiced. 3) Remove the time entry from the invoice but leave it marked as invoiced. Right now, Harvest only does #3, but doesn’t indicate what it’s doing, so it’s very confusing to users.

luckman212: I think we did the reconciliation audit separately for each client. The detailed report shows the total billable time in dollars, and then we compare that to the sum of all invoices for that client in an invoice report.

(+1) Me too — I would use this all the time (no pun intended :)

Hey Samara: Thanks for the Ack. As you prioritize this, please realize that the severity of this issue isn’t just “counter-productive”, it generally causes you to mark time entries as invoiced that have not actually invoiced — this means that you’re not billing customers, but working for free! For us, a lost time entry can potentially be worth more than one years worth of Harvest subscription. And, we didn’t realize this was happening until we did an audit of the sum of our invoices vs the sum of all time entries (times their bill rate). I suspect that a lot of Harvest customers have lost time/money without realizing it.

Ahmen! (+1)

This is also a HUGE source of pain and confusion for us, too.

At a minimum, when you delete a line item, Harvest should ask you whether you would like to leave the item marked as invoiced or revert it to be marked as uninvoiced.

We basically follow the rule that if you want to remove line items, you need to delete the whole invoice and start again with a new time range — ouch!

Regarding the last comment about invoices and time entries knowing about each other: I, too, really want the ability to see which invoice a given time entry is associated with. And, I’ll go further and say that I need to know which invoices are associated with a project (since time entries are associated with projects).

Just today, I had a customer send me information that required modifying and resending an invoice (that has already been sent).

1) There was a change in the invoice amount.

2) There was the addition of a PO number (previously it was blank)

This created several traceability issues:

A) There is no way to easily see exactly what the invoiced looked like the first time we sent it (after it has been edited). (I work around this by always attaching a PDF copy of the invoice to the email sent to the customer and always CC myself so that I have a copy, too).

B) There’s no way for me to know why the invoice was edited and resent.

These issues have been raised before, but I figured that making a note of my problem/use-case, right as it’s happening would be of value.

Again, my suggestions would be the following:

i) When an invoice is sent to customers, a copy of it should be stored in harvest so that it can be viewed as it was sent to the customer.

ii) It should be possible to create custom notes in the Invoice History explaining why an invoice is resent.

ii) If I edit an invoice that has already been sent, Harvest should prompt me to include a comment about the change and include this in the history. Bonus points if harvest does automatic differencing/change-detection to create a default log entry with a list of changes (e.g. “PO Number changed from ‘blank’ to ‘ABC’.”, or “New Line Item Added: yada yada”)

Thanks,

Samara: By “data” I meant “time log entries”. The workflow is like this. For a variety of reasons we may find that all time entries by a user from DateA to DateB on ProjectX need to be moved to ProjectY, or have their task changed from Task1 to Task2. What I’d like to be able to do is create a Detailed Time Report and then adjust the Project and/or Tasks of all the time entries (or perhaps selected time entries) in a very simple way.

For example, we might decide, after the fact, that what a user was working on all last week was not “Support” (task), but “Sales”. Or, we realize that the work was for “Widget Tester” (project), not “Widget Builder”.

Right now, the only way to fix this problem is by manually editing each time log entry in the Daily Timesheet editor.

I find that I need to do this, too, occasionally. It’s not an extremely common use case for me (because I’m careful to avoid situations where I’ll need to do it), but it’s filled with pain and suffering, every time I do need to do it :(

Dan: That’s a cool hack! I’d be a little scared of using it, too :)

When you do a report and then want to redo the same report, but for a different Person or Hours, the form forgets the last values — however, it doesn’t forget the Company or Project fields. This makes it a pain to quickly run the same report for several people (for example, how many billable hours did each person log last month).

(+1) I agree. It would be nice if a company’s name could be different for billing/invoicing than the one used for display throughout Harvest.

Estimate drafts show “DRAFT” when viewed in the harvest web UI. However, when generating a PDF, they don’t say “DRAFT” anywhere — I assumed they would.

(+1) I would like this, too. We often ping customers outside of harvest (email, phone) and would like to log that interaction in the history.

Thanks, Barry and Dee!

@porchlightatl: (+1) I also want the ability to be able to set the invoice settings for each project. And, in addition to setting the default settings, I’d like to set up a billing period and have harvest auto-generate draft invoices that suck in time entires from the billing period (and notify me that a draft was created so that I can review and send).

@thebluegroup: Duplicating invoices doesn’t work well for invoicing time new records using existing invoice settings. It copies the entire invoice, line items and all.

The invoice history shows when an invoice was created, but the log message simply states: “Invoice Created”.

I would expect it to state: “Invoice Created by Jim Kring” (or similar).

Note: The invoice history shows which harvest user sent an invoice (and to whom), so it seems that these history messages just need to be improved for some other types of invoice events/operations.

There’s a good thread already going for this feature request, here. Be sure to add your “(+1) me too” there :)

In our workflow (business to business), we send customers a “quote” and they respond by sending a “purchase order” (that references the quote) — each of these is basically a binding agreement. The concept of “accepting an estimate” (by clicking a button) is really too relaxed for us. In my case, I’d like to disable the option for customers (anyone who has access to the estimate URL) to click the “Accept Estimate” button. However, if the customer had the option to attach a purchase order when they click the “Accept Estimate” button, then I might reconsider :)

So, I’d like to request a feature: I want a global option to disable the “Accept Estimate” and “Decline Estimate” buttons in the web estimate view.

Note: We add purchasing instructions in the “notes” field at the bottom of the estimate telling customers that they can place the order by emailing or faxing us a purchase order.

I’d like it if Harvest had a way for me to easily email members of a project team (for example, from the “Edit Project” page).

I find myself frequently needing to send an email to the project team:

- when I create a new project and want to tell the team they are cleared to start work

- when I archive a project and don’t want the team billing time against it anymore (it’s nice for them to know why it “disappeared”)

- when I change some setting of the project (time budget, etc.)

It would be nice if I had the option to email individual team members, only project managers, or everyone on the project.

After adding new clients and projects, I’ve noticed that they don’t seem to be searchable (via the search box) in the Manage Projects page. I would assume this is because it hasn’t been indexed, or something. I’ve even tried doing a page refresh and that doesn’t seem to help.

Anyone else see this, too?

Thanks,

Now that we have Harvest HD with a “roomier” screen layout, I would like it if the “ID” column were wider in the Invoices >> Overview page.

As you can see, below, it’s way to narrow for my Invoice IDs, which follow the convention: ABCD-NNN-NNN

• A quick solution would be to make this column wider.
• An even nicer solution would be to auto-adjust the column width.
• And, an even nicer solution would be to make the column widths user-adjustable.

Thanks,

-Jim

I’ll jump on the bandwagon, again, since it’s been almost a year since my last “I agree” post — I still agree that there is much room for improving the invoice searching capabilities.

None of the six preset color schemes really do it for me. I’d like to be able to specify the exact RGB values to be used.

Also, the forums are still not respecting the Link formatting markup (please fix).

Here’s a link to the Time Tracking API:

http://www.getharvest.com/api/time-tracking

The documentation for the “Time Tracking API”:http://www.getharvest.com/api/time-tracking only shows the URI for getting time entries made by the requesting user (the user account that authenticated the HTTP connection). The URI for this is as follows:

GET /daily/#{day_of_the_year}/#{year}

However, it is also possible (for administrator-level users) to access time entries for any user, using the following URI:

GET /daily/#{user_id}/#{day_of_the_year}/#{year}

The latter is completely undocumented (except that it also happens to be the URI when browsing other users timesheet in the Harvest Web UI).

Is part of the API officially supported? Can we get it added to the documentation? Also, what other methods support this additional argument? Can we create a time entry on behalf of another user? Is this done via the URI or by adding the user_id to the XML POST data?

Thanks,

You’ll need to configure new projects (or tasks within the projects) with your new hourly rate and start entering time against those. Changing the hourly rate of existing projects/tasks will change the rate (and reports) for existing time entries on those projects/tasks (however, it should not impact invoices already created).

tavon,

There’s a bug in the harvest forums. They link markup isn’t being parsed correctly. Just use raw links in-line (don’t use quotes around display text, since they are being interpreted as fancy/curly quote).

Regarding SyncrHQ, this this looks really cool — I’ll check it out. We’re using QB Desktop right now, so I might wait for that feature to roll out…

The Harvest forums seem to be not parsing links correctly, lately (it’s interpreting my quotes, for the link, as “fancy/curly quotes”). Here’s the link that got garbled in my last post:

Report on Invoices by Project
http://forum.getharvest.com/forums/feature-requ…

Barry: Sweet! I just tested it (in the web UI) and it works beautifully — it preserves zero padding and even handles a few corner cases I just tested. I was a little worried, at first, because I implemented similar invoice auto-incrementing code myself and know there are a few tricky corner cases :)

But, I’m not sure I can use this feature for invoicing clients where we have several projects, because…

We currently use a different invoice prefix for each project. For example

- MSFT-PROJA-002 (Project A)
- MSFT-PROJB-006 (Project B)

The prefix is how we tell, from a glance, which project an invoice is for (since our invoices are always for one and only one project, since we use a separate project for each purchase orders, since we need to be able to know how much funds are on each purchase order, but I digress…).

However, if I had an easy way to Report on Invoices by Project I could use the same invoice naming prefix for each project, and take full advantage of this great new feature :)

Hey Christopher, From a high level (not knowing the implementation details of how Harvest stores it’s date, where things can certainly get murky) I don’t really see it being complicated. It’s just an indirect relationship (Project has Time Entries belonging to Projects), which should be relatively easy to query against. Even if it takes a few queries and some code/scripting magic to distill, it would totally be worth it (IMO). The only time this query would be executed is in the “Invoice >> Report” window, so it’s OK if it’s a computationally expensive operation. That said, I’d also LOVE to have a list of invoices (or a hyperlink to a report with a list of invoices) for a project visible in the “Edit Project” and “Report >> Project Status >> Full Project Report” pages.

Christopher: I can’t speak for ediligent, but I’ll fill you in on some of the things I think I’d like to see.

Availability
For employees and contractors we need a way to define their availability to do work. I’d like this to be in terms of each week in the calendar, meaning an editable number of working hours for each week in the calendar. I think that keeps it pretty simple (we tend to already speak in terms of “hours per week”, availability — for example: “next week, I’ll be available for 20 hours, but I can commit to 32 the following week”). Each employee and contractor would be responsible for editing their availability in the calendar, probably three months into the future (and maybe have some default availability that’s assumed).

Allocation (Assignment)
I want employees and contractors to specify which projects they intend to work on in the future (and I want the ability, as a manager, to edit/assign their allocation). This is what I meant by “it’s like filling out their timesheet in advance”.

Resource Planning
At a high level, I want to be able to monitor the gap in availability vs. assignment. You can think of this like inventory management — availability is inventory and assignment is orders. Our consulting sales process needs this in order to know whether we need to start getting more projects into the pipe.

Employee Accountability
We want to be able monitor the gap, for each employee, between their allocation and their actual work output. For example, if they commit to working billable 32 hours and they are only putting in 20, then that’s a problem (since we were made a forecast of our revenue, and budgeting decisions, based on 32 hours).

Thanks for the info, Barry. Will this scheme support incrementing invoice “numbers” that include non-numeric prefixes? For example, we will often create invoices that have a customer name prefix like “IBM-001”, “AMD-005”, “MSFT-013” etc. What I’d like is for the auto-incrementing algorithm to be able to find the trailing numbers and then increment that number. For example, if my last invoice is “MSFT-013”, then I’d like the next one to be “MSFT-014”.

Oh, also, will this feature in the API be trickling up to the Harvest Web User Interface? Meaning, if I create an invoice via the web, will it allow me to choose auto-numbering for the name?

Thanks,

Arg… harvest forum is garbling my markup. Here’s the link to the attaching PDFs to Estimates:
http://forum.getharvest.com/forums/feature-requ…

@sherring: AMEN on being able to customize some all caps “INVOICE” text at the top.

@jaapoost: There’s another request to add PDF’s to invoice emails, “here”:http://forum.getharvest.com/forums/feature-req…. Please be sure to add your vote/comment to that thread too, please :)

I’d like functionality like this too, but it doesn’t currently exist in Harvest, to the best of my knowledge.

I’d like a feature where engineers would be able to estimate which projects they are going to be working on in advance of the work — sort of like filling out an estimated timesheet in advance. Basically, we need to be able to figure out who has availability and make estimates about revenue and when to start filling our sales pipeline. Adding the distinction of treating contractors differently (in terms of their availability to work) would be awesome, too.

[I might have already mentioned/requested this, but I can’t find where, so…]

I would like the ability to search for Invoices by Project (in addition to by Client, which is currently possible).

I find that I often need to find all the invoices for a given project, to see how much has been billed against the project to date. Searching by Client is not enough, since we usually have multiple projects per customer.

Also, a text-based search, similar to the “Manager >> Projects” page would be really helpful.

Barry,

That’s great and I like the new styling of the API Documentation area — it’s very clean.

Question: How is the unique number auto-generated? I’d love to have the ability to set a naming convention for each project. I have multiple projects and I use a naming convention for each project so that I can easily find them (since there is no way to search for invoices by project that I know of).

(+1) I agree. Right now, the only people that can approve timesheets are Harvest account administrators. I’d like to be able to define a manager for each person or to have the ability for project managers to approve time entries for their project.

None of the invoice reports show the payment due date or net terms. I’m trying to run some reports in excel to see how promptly (relative to the payment due date) a given customer pays their invoices, but I can’t do this without knowing the payment due date. The exports only show the invoice issued date and the payment date.

Thanks,

Shawn: Thanks for pointing that out. It’s very helpful.

The “Detailed Time Report” page (Reports >> Detailed Time) allows you to filter by “uninvoiced billable hours” for all clients or individual clients.

(+1) I agree. One use case we have every single billing period (1 month, 2 weeks, etc.) is finding out who needs to be billed, so that we can generate and send invoices. Right now, (I think) there’s no easy way to do this in Harvest.

Thank you, Patrick and the Harvest team!

I have a bunch of Invoice tabs open and refreshing them shows the new page titles — sweet! :)

Update: I just noticed that it now seems possible to invoice hours in an archived project — that’s GREAT! When this this get implemented? I’m totally going to start using this.

I agree :)

See here: http://forum.getharvest.com/forums/feature-requ…

Hey Chip,

To the best of my knowledge, there hasn’t been any public discussion by the harvest team about adding PO functionality. But, I’ve been lobbying hard for it :)

Also, the more research I’ve done, I’m realizing that what we’re looking for is more of a “Professional Services Automation Software”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_servi… solution. However, the ones that I’ve looked at are nowhere near as easy-to-use (as Harvest is) for time tracking and invoicing. So, I’d love it if Harvest would start adding more features along those lines (like PO tracking).

Cheers,

-Jim

I didn’t get any response from a harvest team member, so I figured I would bump this topic, again.

This feature (or bug-fix, depending on your perspective) would be extremely useful to our company.

Thanks,

I find this very annoying, too. I would love to have a “footer” that can be placed at the bottom of every page.

Most browsers have built-in spell check capabilities. FWIW, I don’t find that I need web applications to have their own spell check capabilities. Which web browser are you using?

@William: I’ve been requesting a Harvest feature to allow tracking Purchase Orders (that our customers send us for projects) where we could invoice against a purchase order and then see the total amount invoiced against a given PO. It would then be very easy to compare the total billable hours revenue with the total amount billed against a PO.

Hi Christopher,

In the case I’ve described, I want a warning that time entries deleted from an invoice are not actually deleted — only the invoice line item is deleted.

The problem we get into is that there is always ambiguity, when editing invoices, about what happens to the actual time entry when it is deleted from an invoice. I feel that this is something that should be more intuitive, perhaps by telling the user how Harvest deals with the time entry when it is deleted from the Invoice, right at the time the user deletes the line item.

Also, this ambiguity can create billing problems. For example, we create two invoices: One for the first half of the month and another for the second half of the month. Then, for whatever reason, we decide to move one time entry from the first invoice to the second invoice. We do this by deleting the line item from the first invoice and then adding a new line item to the second invoice that’s identical to the one we deleted from the first invoice. Next month, we create a new invoice for all uninvoiced time, and the time entry from the line item we deleted from the first invoice reappears.

Here’s what happened: The time entry was removed from the first invoice and marked as uninvoiced, but the time entry was not actually deleted. Then, a new line item was added to the second invoice, but it was not the actual time entry, it was just an invoice line item. Then, when we created the third invoice, the uninvoiced time entry was added (since it got marked as uninvoiced).

You can see how this is a problem: we billed our customer twice for the same time entry! That’s not good and makes us look really unprofessional.

While you and I understand why this happened, an admin who is creating invoices probably doesn’t — it’s not intuitive.

So, at a minimum, we need better information shown in the invoice editing UI that tells the user what happens to the time entry associated with the line item they deleted.

What would also be useful (to directly address the use case I described) are:

1) A way to move a line item from one invoice draft to another invoice draft.

2) A way to add time records to an existing invoice draft.

Thanks,

Same for me. I wish there were a way I could “star” a project to make it always float to the top of any project list/drop-down. (e.g. show a list of starred projects above the comprehensive list).

I’ve found that deleting or editing a time entry line item from an invoice does not delete the time record. This is a great feature, but I think that there should be some kind of warning to the user.

Thanks,

-Jim

In working around the issue where we’ve invoiced time entries that need to be corrected, I find that I often need a way to toggle the invoiced/uninvoiced status for a single time entry.

However, (it seems) it is not possible to mark a single time entry as invoiced/uninvoiced (e.g. in the detailed time report), when there are multiple time entries in the day in question (because the mark as invoiced/uninvoiced action is done to all time entries that match the detailed report criteria, which only has date [not time] resolution).

Thanks!

-Jim

I believe that there should be some option to only allow approved timesheet hours to be added to invoices.

We’re getting into a bit of a pickle, every now and again, because hours get invoiced (an therefore locked) before a timesheet is submitted and approved.

Also, I find that it’s very difficult to fix the problems in hours that have already been invoived:

1) Editing an invoice line item (time entry) does not adjust the time log entry.

2) The time log entry cannot be edited, because it is locked.

3) It is not possible to mark a single time entry as invoiced/uninvoiced (e.g. in the detailed time report), when there are multiple time entries in the day in question (because the mark as invoiced/uninvoiced action is done to all time entries that match the detailed report criteria, which only has date [not time] resolution).

The best way I’ve found to work around the issue is to (a) delete the invoice (if it has not been sent to the customer) and thereby unlock the incorrect time entry, (b) fix the time entry, and © recreate the invoice.

Thanks for listening :)

-Jim

I think it would be cool if we could define sub-projects. Basically, I often have projects with several phases/milestones and I would like to be able to group these somehow. I think that sub-projects might be a good way.

(+1) Me, too :) We’re doing this in Harvest and find that it works OK, but it’s a lot of manual work to add accrued time (to the time budget, which is the total PTO accrued). So, we actually just started tracking accrued PTO in a separate tool, but we still use Harvest for people to enter their individual PTO days.

I agree. Seeing a list of projects with uninvoiced billable hours is a very common and high-priority (not to mention tedious) use case for us, too.

I would like an option to “Include a PDF version of the estimate” when sending an estimate by email. There is an “Include a PDF version of the invoice” option for invoices sent by email. It seems odd that there is no counterpart for estimates.

Now, I know that the customer can get a PDF by visiting the estimate link in the email, but I’ve removed this link because I don’t want customers going to the harvest website to view the estimate. Our customers typically approve an estimate (which I have renamed as “quote” in the translations configuration) by sending us a Purchase Order that references the Quote ID. So, the customer needs the quote as a PDF, so that their purchasing department can place the order. And, I don’t want my customer to have to do an extra step (visit the harvest site) to get the quote in PDF form.

Thanks,

Hi Barry, Thanks for prioritizing this request and for the info about the updated_since parameter — that’s useful for synchronization.

I would suggest adding support for the “page=N” argument to the “/projects” or “/clients” API queries (rather than returning all projects or clients).

Currently, the “/invoices” API query supports a “page=N” argument, however this does not seem to be also supported for the “/projects” or “/clients” queries. This creates a scaling problem when there are lots of clients and/or projects.

In terms of supporting the existing behavior, I would make the default value of “page=0” and give this (0) the meaning of “all pages”. If page > 0, then it would only return 50 items at a time.

Note: it might also be nice to be able to set a “page-size=50” argument to override the default page size.

On the API documentation page it describes that a throttle limit (40 requests in less than 15 seconds) will result in an error 503. However, I’m getting a 502 error with the header info below:

(HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway
Server: nginx
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2010 04:26:41 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 2695)

The content is a an HTML doc titled “HARVEST: Error”.

Hi Barry. Since your adding this onto the roadmap, I’ll add another thought:

If I create an invoice via the API and omit the field (omit it from the XML of the ), then I would expect the Invoice notes to use the default value from the Invoice settings (currently, the notes will be blank if no notes are specified). However, if I explicitly specify an empty string for notes () then i would expect it to set an empty value for notes.

Thanks,

Hi Barry. Thanks for the info. I’d love to see this feature, so please consider this a request :)

Thanks for the info, Barry. Then, please consider this a feature request :)

I’d like this feature, too, and I need a way to read and write tags using the API. Also, I’d like to be able to tag Projects and Clients, in addition to Invoices.

Is there a way to use the API to programmatically interact with timesheets?

For example:

• list timesheets that are unsubmitted, pending approval, etc.
• submit and approve timesheets.

I don’t see a way (here) to filter invoices by purchase order.

For example, I want and tried to do the following…

GET /invoices?purchase-order=ABC123

…to return all invoices against PO# “ABC123”, but this didn’t work.

Any way to do this?

Is there any way to use the API to read the default value of Invoice Notes?

I’m trying to use the API to generate invoices and I’d like them to have the same notes in the footer as invoices created manually (by users in the web browser). So, I’d like to read the Invoice Notes using the API and then stuff this into new invoices I create using the API.

Thanks,

(+1) me too! I always end up having to rename these to the Invoice Name/ID

Hey Samara: Since you’re making notes about this, I’ll add a couple things:

1) I’d like for each project to have a defined billing period (monthly, every two weeks, etc.). I would want to have the invoice auto-generated at some time delay after the billing period. (I want to bill on the 7th, for all time worked in the previous month). The delay ensures that everyone has entered their time during the billing period in question.

2) I’d like to define an Invoice ID (Naming) convention, like ACME-001, ACME-002, AMCE-003.

3) I want the ability to not have the invoice automatically sent — just automatically created [with a notification email sent to the user who must approve and send the invoice] so that it can be reviewed and approved before being sent.

Currently, all invoices (even those previously sent) change their appearance based on the current settings in Harvest (like company logo, billing address, etc.).

What I want is some way to see the invoice (in PDF form) exactly as it appeared when the invoice was sent.

The activity log shows a text-based form of what the invoice looked like, but I would really like it if these activity logs included a downloadable copy of the PDF file (same PDF included in the original email).

Without such a feature, there isn’t nearly enough traceability.

We have more than one user creating invoices and find that we need to be able to see who created an invoice that is left in a DRAFT (unsent) state.

Currently, it’s possible to see when an invoice was created (the creation date is shown at the top of the invoice page), but it’s not possible to see the name of the user who created the invoices.

Currently, it seems that the project search feature treats space characters as literals.

For example, if I search for “FOO BAR”, the search will be for a project or client that matches “FOO BAR”, literally (including the space). However, I would expect (since most good software works this way) that the search would return any client or project that matches the terms “FOO” AND “BAR”.

For example, currently, only the following projects would be found:

My FOO BAR Project
Some FOO BAR Client

However, I would want it to also match:

BAR with great FOOd
I asked the BARber for a Foo Manchu [sic]

Thanks,

My suggestion would be to take invoice defaults one step further and save settings on a per project basis. For professional services, each customer/project has slightly different invoicing requirements that are negotiated on a case-by-case basis.

I think FreshBooks has such a feature — sorry, I had to say that to make sure that I really got the Harvest team’s attention ;)

(+1) I agree about having an easy option to include total hours (in addition to total cost) of the invoice (Harvest is a time tracking too, is it not?).

The search feature on the Manage Projects page is very nice. However, sometimes I want to limit the search scope to only show active projects.

It might be nice if there were a checkbox at the top of the results that let you choose whether or not you want to see archived project. My thinking is that this would be unchecked (don’t show archived projects) by default.

The reason I need this is that I have some customers for home we have done many (~25) projects and the archived ones clutter up the search results.

Thanks,

We ran into a problem today when two users were editing the same invoice. The result was that one user’s invoice draft was deleted by another user.

It would be nice if there were a way to see that another user is editing an invoice that you are viewing/editing. Another option would be to warn a user who tries to edit/delete an invoice that harvest thinks another user is editing.

It’s a bit annoying to me that there is no “Today” button on the Calendar/Date pop-up control.

Periodically, I need to perform a mass edit of time entries. For example, I need to be able to take all time entries from a project that are entered after certain date and move them to a new project.

This situation comes up in a variety of situations:

• A user enters time into the wrong project
• A new project is created and some time entries from an existing project need to be moved into the new project

Can I vote twice? Me too, again :)

It would be nice if harvest would verify the invoice date, when I press the send button and give me the option to cancel if the invoice date does not equal today’s date.

Our Use Case – Often, the person who prepares an invoice is not the person who sends it, and often it is sent on a different day than it is prepared (since invoices have to be reviewed/approved before sending). So, when an invoice is created, we don’t actually know the date that it will be first sent. The problem is that harvest populates the invoice date, on the date it is created — but, we mostly care about the date it is sent.

@Danny: That’s very exciting news.

I almost always want to subscribe to receive emails when creating a new forum topic, and usually when replying to a topic. It would be nice if these were default or configurable defaults.

The Formatting Help only shows up when commenting on an existing Topic. I’d like to see it when I’m starting a New Topic.

Here’s a link to the screenshot. Sorry for screwing up the page formatting.

http://content.screencast.com/users/jimkring/fo…

I’ve had to delete a lot of zero-length time entries in harvest lately (but, that’s another issue) and it’s a bit too difficult. It could be a lot easier, as shown in the screenshot, below:

Thanks,

I think you’ll have to work around this, but creating one project for every month.

I duplicated an archived project and the new (duplicate) project had an archived status. Shouldn’t the new project be active? It was a real pain to un-archive the project. It would also be nice if there were an option to un-archive a project when editing that project.

Thanks for listening!

YES!!! Actually, I would love for this feature to integrate into something that let me calculate travel distance (mileage) too. I’d like for each person to be able to enter the drive distances between their home and every customer site they visit. Then, harvest could calculate the distance they’ve driven every day.

Hi Karen. Thanks for the answer.

Here’s some feedback:

Based on my use cases, there’s no reason that a contractor should not be a project manager — in my case, I’ve hired a contractor to do project management?

What I’d like to see are some features around keeping track of payments to contractors (having bill rates to customers for the contractor’s work and pay rates for compensating contractors for their hourly work).

What’s the difference between an employee and a contractor, from harvest’s perspective? Is this documented anywhere? I can’t seem to find any info about this.

Specifically, I’m curious whether contractors can be project managers. What can’t a contractor access (or do) that an employee can do?

Bump…

What’s the difference between an employee and a contractor, from harvest’s perspective? Is this documented anywhere? I can’t seem to find any info about this.

Specifically, I’m curious whether contractors can be project managers. What can’t a contractor access (or do) that an employee can do?

Hi Shawn, Great — that’s it! I’m not sure how I missed that, but it’s exactly what I was looking for.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to do this. I would expect this information to be visible under the Manage >> People >> USERNAME page.

(+1) I don’t think it’s possible, but I’d like to see this feature.

Don’t worry about it. I had a similar experience last week :)

That’s already an option in the project’s settings.

Hi Danny,

OK, I totally missed that. I think that there is a minor usability issue.

• [Issue 1] radio buttons are usually organized vertically, not horizontally.
• [Issue 2] this setting doesn’t have a name/label (note that all the other settings have a label in the first column)

Now, my next question is… what’s the difference between an employee and a contractor, from harvest’s perspective. Is this documented anywhere? I can’t seem to find any info about this.

Specifically, I’m curious whether contractors can be project managers. What can’t a contractor access (or do) that an employee can do?

Thanks,

I concur — it’s fixed. Thanks, Danny and Harvest Team!

(+1) I agree with this. I often follow-up by phone or email (outside of harvest) and I need to log it.

What’s the best way to handle changing a user from employee to contractor (or vice versa)?

I don’t see any way to toggle a setting on the user’s account.

Do I just archive the employee and add a new contractor user with the same name?

In addition to contractors, we just (this week) hired an hourly admin employee. So, we need a pay rate, in addition to a bill rate. And, I’d love to be able to have a good way to keep track of whether we’ve payed hourly workers.

Thanks,

Ya, I hear you. I was just telling you our work-around. We use FogBugz for defining and assigning tasks and Harvest for time tracking. Right now, Harvest’s tasks are really types/categories of tasks.

Our work-around is to add a unique Task ID tag to each time entry (e.g. “[Task 123]”) and then use some sort of post-processing of time log entries.

I’ve made this request, too.

The current work-around is to create multiple clients, but this can cause problems if you are exporting data to QuickBooks, or similar, and you need the clients to match up.

The problem, IMO, is that there is no such thing as invoicing against a single project, where each project would have its own invoice settings/defaults.

I have to assume that the new Google Apps marketplace is on Harvest’s radar. Any plans for Harvest integration?

http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/home

Our invoices can contain a great many line items, and be several pages long. If I want to edit only the subject or date, it’s very painful to have to scroll the the very bottom of the page to press the “Save” or “Cancel” buttons. If they were at the top, it would save me several seconds of work.

Thanks!

Thanks!

The customer and project listing in the new, official harvest iPhone app don’t seem to make sense to me. They sort of seem to be alphabetical, but then there are a lot of exceptions. I would expect them to be grouped by alphabetically sorted customers, and then by alphabetically sorted projects under each customer.

Thanks,

The harvest forum RSS feed does not apply formatting to the content — it shows the raw formatting/markup tags. It would be nice if the content in the RSS feed appeared the same way as the rendered forum pages.

I’d really like to be able to specify a custom X value for “Net X” terms of an Invoice’s Due Date.

I have a customer who requires Net 53 (yes that’s right, Net 53) payment terms. I’m finding this very difficult to handle in harvest, since I have to manually figure out the actual due date of the invoice.

The Invoice Due Date field is a drop-down list with the options: “Upon receipt”, “Net 15”, “Net 30”, “Net 45”, “Net 60”, and “Custom”. If I choose “Custom”, then a text box field appears when I can enter a date. If I click on the text box, a Calendar Control appears. That’s very nice, but if I try to type something like “Net 53”, I get an error from the input validator that says “this date does not seem to be valid” and it changes the value to “53” (which isn’t a valid date, obviously).

What I’d really like is to be able to specify a custom X value for “Net X”. I can think of a couple implementations:

Implementation A: the Due Date field’s input validator could allow me to type “Net 53” and then do the math and convert this to the correct date, 53 days from now.

Implementation B: there are two “Custom” options in the Due Date drop-down selector: (1) Custom Due Date and (2) Custom Net Days. If I choose #1, then I get the current behavior. If I choose #2, then I can enter the number of days (and maybe have some indicator display the actual due date).

Thanks for listening,

Hi Danny, thanks for the Ack. FYI, I just had a conversation with one of our project managers today who communicated to me that “it sometimes feels like it takes way to many clicks to get stuff done” in Harvest.

If I enter a search filter in the Manage >> Projects page, then click on a project to edit it, after I’m done viewing/editing the project and click “Save Project Settings”, “Cancel”, or the browser’s “Back” navigation button, harvest forgets my search filter string.

My use case is typically that I’m trying to work on a specific customer or project and it’s very cumbersome to keep entering my search string (e.g. the client’s name).

It would be a huge help if the search filter remembered the search string rather than forgetting it.

Thanks,

I agree.

When I’m not in “Time Entry” or “Time Approval” mode, I’m in “Client Management” mode. Client management mode means: “Getting an Account Statement” (of all invoices sent to client plus payment status) or “Invoicing a (single) Customer”.

I really don’t like all the drill-down that I have to do, currently (on the invoices page), to find and create invoices for a customer (it seems like I’m constantly having to re-select the client from a huge drop-down list of all my [50 or so] clients). I want to just go to the customer/project page once and then view and create invoices for that customer.

Now, once in a while (but less frequently) I’m in invoice reporting mode, where I want to know “who owes me money (and how much)?”, “who’s past due on invoices?”, “how much did I invoice in april?”, etc.

So, I’d love to see more capabilities that let me drill down and focus my view on specific clients (without having to drill down under the Invoices page/tab).

IMO, the ideal solution would be to have the ability to choose default values on a per customer basis. Basically, I want a system for creating invoice templates that store invoice settings on a per client/project basis — I desperately need this, since I’ve got about 10 projects going at any given time and each of them has slightly different invoicing settings.

(+1) Great idea! We also charge an additional fee for pay by credit card.

(+1) I agree with @ndintenfass and consider this to be a bug. The “Create Invoice” page (where you select from which projects you wish to pull time for the invoice) shows the last invoices for the project — it simply loses this information and shows the last invoice, globally (instead of for that project/client), in the Edit Invoice page.

I agree. In fact I requested this a while back, here: "Need a Project Lifespan option in the Timeframe drop-down selector ":http://forum.getharvest.com/forums/feature-requests/topics/need-a-project-lifespan-option-in-the-timeframe-drop-down-selector

Hi Shawn, I’m glad this made it onto your radar. You’re right that the solution won’t be trivial. I think it would require adding support for Purchase Orders, which I’ve mentioned in my post about our company’s professional services workflow. Thanks.

Oh, I see. I’ve given credit on invoices, too, but I’ve never had a situation where any invoice was net negative (let alone all invoices for a month are negative). I can see where this could be useful, in low volume settings.

How would your invoice totals equal a negative number? Would imply that you owe money?

Hi bradesp,

Thanks for the support. Yes, that’s how I would classify our customers: fortune 1000. We’re only a 9-person firm, but maybe we’ll be a 100-200 person firm, someday :)

Hi Karen: I wasn’t advocating that Harvest implement Excel’s flexibility. I was advocating that you show how your users how to use Excel to great reports on raw Harvest data, using Excel’s Pivot Table and Pivot Chart tools.

Hi bjhess,

Thanks for the response. I’m glad to hear that this is on your radar.

Just to add more evidence for the importance of this, here’s another article I just noticed:

Seven Major Websites that Send Passwords Unprotected, and State Sponsored Deep Packet Inspection

Thanks,

Count me in, too +1

I really like Harvest Co-op, but I’m concerned about the fact that it doesn’t support (or better, require) a secure HTTPS (SSL) connection.

BTW, Gmail just switched to default https encryption following a hacking attack by those opposed to human rights activism in China.

My point is that secure web transactions are very important ;)

Thanks

I agree. Right now, the only way to find invoices is using the “Invoice >> Report” feature, which seems to take a lot more time than is necessary. I think that the “Account Statement” feature (discussed as being in the works) would be nice way to address this use case, too.

Doug,

Thanks, it seems that I “get” it now. However, this was very painful for me. And, since I like to consider myself to be a smart, computer-savvy person, I have to imaging that I’m not the only one who won’t understand. Maybe instructions, in addition to the example, would be useful.

Thanks,

Hi Doug,

OK, another test:

I hope it works…

Doug,

I have no idea how to do bock quotes. The Formatting Help says:

Block Quotes: bq. (quotes)

What does this mean? As you can see, I copied and pasted from the formatting help and it does not generate any block quotes.

Hi Doug,

Thanks for your work on this and for the explanation.

I’ll do some testing….

Bold: bold
Italic: italics
Block Quotes: bq. (quotes)
Links: Harvest
Images:

@Karen: Thanks for pluging my thread. However, I think Yariv is looking for a purchasing system (POs placed by his/her company to its venders), whereas I want to manage POs placed our company’s customers for our services.

@Karen: I think it’s worth showing Harvest users how to utilize Excel’s Pivot Table/Chart feature for reporting on raw Harvest export data — for example, it’s almost trivial to create reports on hours worked per month/year by each person/project/etc.. A blog post on this would be extremely worthwhile.

I’m concerned about the new “Rounding Up + Incremental Billing” feature: it seems that this is an invoice setting, rather than a project setting. This would imply that the “Rounding Up + Incremental Billing” will not be applied to project status calculations, meaning: the amount of hours left for a project, as calculated by the project status page, might not match up with the actual amount of money left on a project. This discrepancy means that we can no longer use this information when communicating with our clients.

IMO, this problem is due to the fact that harvest doesn’t tie Invoices directly to projects. For example: there’s no way to easily find all invoices against a project, and there’s no way to configure invoice settings on a per-project basis (my invoice setting/defaults vary by project). This missing link is something that is really needed, IMO.

Thanks,

When I’m viewing a timesheet that is pending approval, there does not seem to be an easy way to edit the timesheet. For example, if I notice that the user forgot to log a holiday, I’d like to just make the edit myself. However, doing this requires a lot of work. I’d like to have a link called “Edit Timesheet” that takes me to that user’s timesheet in edit mode.

Thanks,

The page title never changes when using harvest — it’s always “COMPANY_NAME on Harvest”. This means that one can’t effectively use browser multiple tabs with different harvest pages or use the Back/Forward page navigation feature in the web browser (since all the tabs/pages say “COMPANY_NAME on Harvest” — there’s no way to distinguish them).

For example, if I’m viewing an invoice, it would be nice if the page title were something like “Invoice – INVOICE_ID”. Or, if I’m viewing a timesheet, it would be nice if the page were something like “Timesheet for Jim (28 Dec 2009 – 03 Jan 2010)”.

Thanks!

Well, as you can see the formatting didn’t seem to do anything (except that the underscores around “italics” were removed, but no italics formatting was added).

Has anyone figured this out?

I’m not sure if this is a bug, if it’s been fixed, or if I just don’t understand how the forum formatting mark-up works, but I can’t seem to make it work correctly.

The “Formatting Help” to the right of the comments text-entry box states:

Bold: “bold”
Italic: italics
Block Quotes: (quotes)
Urls: “Harvest” http://www.getHarvest.com"
Links: * or #

I’ll do some tests, here (in follow-up comments)…

I would like to be able to see a log of all changes to a project’s settings, such as:

• Person added/removed
• Notes added/removed
• Bill rate changed
• Project Estimate Changed
• etc.

This would allow me to audit any changes to project settings.

Note that the reason this is useful is because we tend to change the project estimates to compensate for a lack of other features in harvest (such as native support for Purchase Orders — when we get a new PO, we will often increase the project estimate).

Thanks,

I agree! We need this feature, badly. For every project, we set a billing period (usually once or twice a month) and need to create invoices for all time worked in that period. This is a very time consuming process for us, right now.

@Karen native support for personal days (vacation/sick days) would be wonderful!

When I log into the forums, it returns me to the main page (http://forum.getharvest.com/). I’d prefer it if it returned me the the same page that I was on before I logged in.

We created a vacation project for each engineer. We use the project budget to keep track of their accrued vacation time. This allows us to know how much vacation time is left for each person. But, it would be great if Harvest could have built-in support for vacation time tracking.

I’d like to be able to easily report on revenue generation using the Excel Export of detailed time, but I can’t do this without the bill rate for every time entry.

A follow-up to this is that Harvest is a great tool to help small businesses grow. So, it should be able to handle the needs of medium-sized companies (rather than just small ones), otherwise companies will be forced to abandon Harvest as they grow. I love Harvest and don’t want to have to switch to less usable tools that have features critical to my business.

Hey Chris,

I’m happy to hear that my firms workflow (and pain points) are similar to yours (only in the sense that I’m not alone). It seems that Harvest has been targeted to smaller design and development firms rather than those who follow more rigorous business to business practices.

Cheers,

@Koen @Karen: In my world (professional services) a customer accepts a Quote by sending a Purchase Order that references the PO. I’d love for Harvest to add the concept of Purchase Order, which I’ve described to some extent, here: http://forum.getharvest.com/forums/feature-requ…

I can’t seen to find a good way to view or report on project backlog. For a professional services company, it’s extremely important to be able to know how much work is in the pipeline.

Essentially, I want to know:

How many hours are remaining across all active project budgets?

How many hours are remaining divided by the number of engineers? This is the amount of time we can stay busy without landing any new projects.

I’m finding it difficult to use Harvest to manage some aspects of my professional services firm’s workflow. I have some ideas on how to improve this.

First, our company’s project life-cycle looks like this:

0) We have clients for whom we work on multiple projects over several years.

1) Client sends us a request for a Quote on a Project.

2) We send customer a quote. Sometimes this is a fixed cost Quote and sometimes it is a time and materials Quote. Quotes may define milestones. Each milestone has an estimated completion date and a cost. (For Fixed Cost Quotes, these Milestones will ultimately be converted to Invoices, once the Milstone is Completed.)

3) Customer sends us a Purchase Order. The purchase order references one Quote (by its quote number). A PO is basically a work authorization.

4) We work on the Project, logging time and expenses.

5) We send Invoices. Invoices reference one Purchase Order.

5a) For Time and Materials Projects, we might Invoice multiple times against the same Purchase Order until the Purchase Order amount is reached or the Project ends. However, even though we are invoicing against Purchase Orders, we like to think of this as Invoicing against a Project — a project has multiple purchase orders. When we invoice a Project, we typically want to invoice against the oldest Purchase Order that has an unvoiced balance remaining. Once that PO becomes depleted, we start invoicing against the next PO that was issued.

5b) For Fixed Cost Projects, we Invoice a fixed amount upon completion of each Milestone. Sometimes there are bonuses for early completion of a Milestone.

6) If a Purchase Order amount is reached, the customer will either extend the purchase order (raise the amount) or issue us a new purchase order. Sometimes they will issue us multiple POs up-front (since it might be easier to get authorization for smaller POs that one large PO), or before POs are actually depleted.

7) Customer pays invoices.

8) Profits!

Now, two major pain points of trying to use Harvest for our project workflow are the following:

(A) Purchase Orders are not tracked as an entity (they aren’t a first class citizen in Harvest) — they are only a text field on an Invoice. There is no way to find all Invoices against a PO, to see if there is any budget left on the PO.

(B) Invoices are not related to Projects — you only add time to Invoices from Projects, and then the Invoice forgets about the Project. There is no way to find all Invoices for a Project.

I do know that there are some work-arounds, like creating a new Project for each Purchase Order. However, this adds a lot more administrative overhead and does not map well into how our engineers think about Projects. It also makes it difficult to report on Projects. And, we need our Harvest Project names to map one-to-one with our QuickBooks Project names.

Here is my suggestion:

Quotes (or Estimates) should relate to a Project or a Product — oh, did I forget to mention that we sell products, too? I’ll suggest that feature soon ;)

Add support for creating Purchase Orders. Purchase Orders reference a Quote (and, thereby indirectly, a Project).

Invoices should reference a Purchase Order (they already do, but these should not be a text field, but a list of all the POs open for the Project being invoiced).

These are my thoughts and I hope they are useful. I’ve been in the professional services business for quote some time and assume that most other firms’ workflows are similar and would map well into this scheme.

Thanks,

Garth,

I agree with you. I’m thinking about our projects and we really need this fine-grained control on a per project basis, not so much on a per client basis.

-Jim

Shawn: Yes, I think that a “client manager” is a good name for this role. I believe that this role is often called an “Account Manager”, but that term is a little ambiguous: e.g., it could mean a client account, vendor account, or a harvest account.

Dee,

Thanks for the ideas.

Renaming projects isn’t a great option, because we use the project names for importing time into QuickBooks. We can’t have a possibility of a mismatch.

“Invoicing that project out” doesn’t work too well either, because we might want to delete and recreate the invoice, for various reasons (which would then requiring us to unarchive the project, which gets a little laborious).

Basically, I’d like to be able to distinguish between these use cases:
A) prevent users from working (logging time) on project
B) prevent managers from invoicing against a project

Right now, the “Archive” feature prevents both scenarios, but it doesn’t address the subtleties of preventing A, but allowing B.

Thanks,

Dee: I see that, now. Thanks for the great tip.

I’d like to be able to report on invoices (revenue actually) by category. For example, when we create an invoice we can categorize each line item of the invoice. We have two main categories that we use: “Consulting Services” and “Product”. I’d like to distinguish between Consulting Services revenue and Product revenue. Is there any way to do this, already? If not, I’d really like it.

Actually, just today a new project manager just started and we would like for that person to be able to create invoices, but not have administrative access to the entire Harvest account.

@Dee: I just ran into a slightly different use case. I left a timer running and I didn’t know when I started the timer (because Harvest doesn’t tell you when a timer was started — only the current timer value). I knew I finished working at about 10pm, but I didn’t know exactly when I started the timer.

Hey Garth,

I agree with you that it would be nice if PM could create invoices. Also, it would be nice to define whether PMs were allowed to send invoices or simply submit them for approval (to be sent to an administrator).

Cheers,

There is a “project manager” permission (checkbox) that can be designated to users who are assigned to a project (this checkbox is next to the users name in the project editor). In this way “project manager” is a per user, per project setting. However, this setting does not provide a way for non-administrators to create new projects. I’m not sure if it allows PMs to invoice, but I think it does not.

I agree that this is an important feature. I’ve heard rumblings that there may be a feature in the works that will allow specifying time entries with start date/time and end date/time. Perhaps “change date of time entry” use case will be addressed by this new feature.

@Danny: Perfect! Thanks for enabling email alerts.

@Karen: I’ve also found it odd that there’s no prominent link to Support (or the Forums) on the main Harvest website (http://www.getharvest.com/) navigation bar (or anywhere else that’s easy to find). When I first started using harvest, it made me feel like there were no support options available. Related to this, I’ve felt that the “Our Community” link on the navigation bar is a bit of a misnomer — really, it’s a bunch of customer quotes and articles. I expected to find resources for community members. I hope this feedback is useful. Thanks.

It would be nice if the “Timeframe” drop-down selector on the “Reports >> Time” area had a “Project lifespan” (or “All time”) option.

There are situations where I want to prevent engineers from logging time on a project, but I don’t want to archive it.

For example: When the time spent on a project reaches its budget, I don’t want people working on it and exceeding the budget. However, I can’t archive it, because I haven’t invoiced the customer yet (and it’s not possible to create an invoice for time in an archived project).

How can I prevent users from logging time on the project, without archiving it?

Also, archiving the project makes it not readily visible/findable in the reporting window. We may want to see it in the reporting area for a little while after we want people to stop logging time to the project.

Me too — I want the timer animation back.

When entering time into Harvest, I’d like an easier way to find projects I care the most about, in the drop-down list of projects.

== Problem ==
I’m assigned to work on many projects. However, at any given time, I’m only actively working on a few projects. I find that it’s extremely difficult to find those few projects I care about in the long drop-down list of projects when I enter my time into harvest.

== Possible Solution ==
I’d love to have a way for my most active projects to appear at the top of the list, so that they are easier to access. Maybe I could “star” them (similar to the feature in GMail where you can click on a star to make it easily distinguishable from other emails). Then, maybe the “starred” projects would float to the top of the pull-down lists when I enter my time.

I agree — this animation is extremely useful for quickly distinguishing the running timer.

Jean: Oh, I see. That sounds a lot like the “Project Retainer” http://forum.getharvest.com/forums/feature-requ…" feature that’s being discussed.

@Karen: You’re right! The “Translations” feature would work pretty good for some of my needs. One thing, though: it doesn’t change the way harvest users see this feature – it only changes how our customers see estimates. For example, if I tell one of our engineers to “send a quote” to a customer, I don’t want the Harvest UI to have an “Estimates” tab (I would prefer the tab to be named “Quotes”).

Right now, invoice emails are sent “from” the harvest user that actually hits the “Send Invoice” button (in Harvest). Based on my needs, I don’t really like this behavior — since I would prefer that all invoices appear as sent from our Accounts Receivable person (or from a special email address like “”mailto:accounts_receivable@acme.com">accounts_receivable@acme.com"), regardless of who hits the send button. Maybe this could be configurable so that the current behavior is still possible for users who like it.

Just to be clear: the timesheet approval page currently shows the Total Hours, but does not show the Total Billable Hours — it would be nice to see both.

On the timesheet approval page, I need the ability to know how many billable hours a person has worked (since this is part of the requirement for approval). Right now, I have to calculate this manually by looking at the timesheet entries, knowing which projects/tasks are billable and then adding them all up.

We’ve had situations like this too. The solution is easy but not obvious: create an additional line item at the end of the invoice of qty 1 for the value you need to mark up/down — set it’s value to a positive value to mark up or negative value to mark down. This is nice because you don’t actually edit any of the “real” time entries.

Every month I do some reports and export the data into a spreadsheet. I’ve noticed that the URLs for the generating reports use fixed date ranges. For example, if I generate a report (say in mid November) for “Last Month”, then the URL contains the date range of Oct 1st through Oct 31st. This means that if I bookmark the report page and revisit the report (a month later), the report page will always have data for the month of Oct. What I’d prefer is if the URL used a parameter like “last-month” instead of a fixed date range, so that I could generate a new report every month by visiting the same, bookmarked page.

Steps to Reproduce:
1) In “Reports >> Detailed Time”, generate a report for any valid Timeframe, Client, Project, Person, and Hours.

2) When viewing the report, click on “Create New Report”

Results:
The Person and Hours fields are reset to their default values of “All” and “All Hours”, respectively, while all other fields have the same values used for the report defined in Step #1.

Expected Results:
I would expect the Person and Hours fields to remember the values used for the report defined in Step #1.

Other comments:

I’m not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but the reporting workflow seems broken for me, based on my workflow where I’m trying to “Edit Report” (I don’t really want to “Create New Report”).

Typically, I generate a report for a person and then generate a report for a different person with the same other report parameter settings. Or, I might want to test how many billable hours there are for a given time period and then look to see how many non-billable hours there are for the same time period. Having the Person and Hours fields reset (but not the other fields) is very confusing and cumbersome.

ukmgranger: I agree that Page Numbers on the invoices is a “must have” feature. I’ve emailed the harvest support team about this a while ago. My invoices are almost always longer than a single page, since we show all time log entries in invoices.

I agree. We don’t use the word “estimate”. We use the word “quote”. I’d love to be able to rename this.

I agree that a freeform CC box would be nice. How about an option somewhere to send a copy of EVERY invoice to a specific email address (such as your bookkeeper, CFO, etc.)?

Karen: This is a great idea. I’d settle for an easier way to easily see an “account statement” for a given customer. Right now, it takes a lot of work to go to Invoices >> Report >> Filter by Client.

Karen: One customization that I’d like it to see the word “INVOICE” in large letters at the top-left of the invoice. I was able to do this by overloading the company logo with the word INVOICE above it. However, this is the same logo used for “Estimates” so this hack means that I can’t use the Estimates feature.

I agree — we’re in the process of setting up a process where we export from Harvest into QB on a regular basis. Once we get this working, I’d like to be able to have the QB export files emailed automatically (to a configurable email address: our bookkeeper) at a configurable interval. Also, is there a way to export to a quickbooks file via the web service API?

Mario: You can already upload your company’s logo to include it in the upper left of invoices.

OK, I figured out a hack. You can simply add “/posts.atom” to the discussion URL to get an RSS feed of all the comments. For example, the RSS feed for this discussion is:

http://forum.getharvest.com/forums/help/topics/…

Is there a reason why the “RSS” icon/link for comments isn’t shown on the discussion page?

Is there any way to subscribe to discussion comments via RSS or Email? I don’t see any obvious way to do this — did I miss something?

Thanks,

Harvest Team,

One thing that seemed to really be lacking (before these forums existed) was a hub for the harvest user community. I’m sure that these forums will do a lot to help the harvest community support its users, as well as collaborate and brainstorm on ideas for improving harvest.

Thank you and keep up the great work.

-Jim

Sorry, I think I wasn’t totally clear (upon re-reading my post). What I mean is: invoices should be customizable on a per project/client basis, with each project/client having its own set of default values.

The most important customization that I want is the ability to create a “template” for each project (or multiple templates for each customer, since harvest doesn’t relate invoices to projects [ya, that’s another feature request I have]). Basically, each client/project should have the same description, invoice name prefix, recipient list, etc. Right now, I have to look at old invoices to see which values I used for all these fields.