Harvest is a time-tracking app for freelancers that includes invoicing, expensing, and team management features. It's an excellent tool for individuals and small organizations that need help with all those aspects of their businesses. Easy to use and easy to connect with other business apps, Harvest is a PCMag Editors' Choice for freelancers and small businesses. Competing app Toggl doesn't offer as much as Harvest, but it's the Editors' Choice for free time-tracking apps, and it's the recommended option if you only need a very simple tracker and no invoicing included.
Pricing and Plans
Harvest offers a limited Free plan and two paid tiers of service: Solo, for individuals at $12 per month, and Team, for teams of two or more at a rate of $12 per person per month. If you pay for an annual contract up front, you get a 10 percent discount. Additionally, Harvest offers a 30-day free trial of the Team account.
The differences between the plans are simple to understand. The Free plan only supports one person and two projects. Solo removes the limit on the projects. And Team removes the limit on both the people and the projects.
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Harvest's prices are high compared to other time-tracking and invoicing apps. For example, Toggl (starting at $10 per person per month) and Hubstaff (starting at $5 per person per month) both cost less. TSheets (Compare Quotes and Save at Tsheets) , which is an Editors' Choice for businesses that need both time tracking and employee monitoring features, also costs a lot less, usually; prices for TSheets vary. Groups of between two and 99 people pay $4 per person per month, plus a base fee of $16 per month for TSheets. So a team of 10 people would pay $56 per month. Larger teams of 100 or more pay $4 per person per month plus a base fee of $80 per month. So a team of 100 would pay $480 per month.
While Harvest's prices are high compared with other similar time tracking and scheduling tools, they are average or low compared with more in-depth project management apps, which also sometimes include time-tracking features.
Editors' Choice Zoho Projects (Free Trial at Zoho Projects) , for example, costs anywhere from $25 to $100 per month, depending on the plan you choose. Those prices are not per person, however, but rather flat rates that support as many team members as you need.
Wrike is another project management app with time-tracking tools, and it costs anywhere from about $10 to $35 per person per month. Bear in mind, however, that project management tools offer a lot more than just the ability to track time, generate invoices, and check whether employees are overbooked, which is the core of what Harvest offers.
Setup and Interface
When you first sign up for a Harvest account, expect to spend at least 15 minutes exploring what the app has to offer and customizing your workspace. You should establish clients and projects, for example, and invite team members to join you. It helps to adjust the color-coding that is automatically added to projects so that it makes sense to you and your team members. Harvest has invoice templates, both for a standard invoice and a retainer invoice, and you need to put all your details into those as well. With Harvest, don't expect to sign up for the app and start tracking time on tasks immediately thereafter. You can do that with Toggl, but not Harvest, because it takes some time to customize the account.
The main interface for Harvest is the web app. When you log in via the web, you have all the tools you need. Harvest does have apps as well, but only for macOS, iOS, and Android. Windows and Linux users are out of luck. These apps are great for tracking time on a task when you're offline or on the go, but the apps are little more than timers. There's a browser extension, too, which just makes it easier to start and stop recording tasks without having to navigate to the web app. Competitor Toggl has more apps, and its browser extension has some useful features, such as a Pomodoro Technique timer for anyone who uses that method of time management for working.
As Harvest tracks your time on task, you can only see a running timer if you're using the Mac app, which shows the hour and minute (but not seconds) in the menu bar. If you use the web app, which you must do if you have Windows or Linux, you can only see the running timer if you leave the web page open. Toggl displays time on task—down to the second—both in its downloadable apps and in the tab for the web app, which I really like. Even if you don't have the tab open, you can see your clock ticking away.
I also like that Harvest gives you a Notes field for adding detail about the task at hand. When working with a team of people, this kind of note-taking ability can be a tremendous help to get some additional information about what each person was specifically doing while working on a task.
Features
While there are elements of Toggl's interface that I prefer over Harvest's, there's no denying that Harvest offers many more features. Toggl keeps a tight focus on time tracking, whereas Harvest provides a more expansive platform for handling small business needs, including invoicing, expenses, projects, and teams.
Harvest's expense tools give you different ways to think about how you manage projects and how you spend your time. For example, while some employees simply bill clients for time spent working, others earn a flat fee per project and need to limit how much time they take to get it done in order to stay profitable. Harvest has tools for doing this kind of math. Harvest also has more standard expense-tracking features, so that you can record and bill for mileage, travel expenses, and other costs. It lets you upload and attach receipts, too.
Team management features allow business owners and team leads to keep an eye on how people are spending their time. As team members join you in Harvest, you can enter a capacity for each person, meaning the number of hours they are available to work. This capacity comes in handy when monitoring whether team members are over or under worked.
Harvest generates wonderful, easy-to-read reports that show how people are spending their time and whether they are at capacity. Each team member appears alongside a bar graph. The bar is filled in with two shades of blue showing total time spent working and billable time. If a bar turns red, it means the individuals is nearing his or her capacity or has exceeded it. You can customize the graph to show whatever length of time you want, whether a week, month, or something else.
You can also drill down to see more details about each person's data, such as the division of their time among projects. These reports help managers see quickly when too much time is being spent on one project or client, or not enough time on another.
What Harvest doesn't offer are employee monitoring tools, such as a virtual punch-clock for checking into and out of work. It also doesn't let you verify whether employees are working on the projects they say they are working on, which you can do if you use a tool that offers screen recording, keystroke logging, IP monitoring, or GPS monitoring. Some time-tracking tools, such as TSheets and Hubstaff, do cover this territory, but Harvest does not.
Integrations
Integration options are one of Harvest's strengths. The service supports a long list of some of the most popular productivity apps and business tools on the market. A few worth mentioning are Asana, Basecamp, Freshdesk, GitHub, Jira, PayPal, Quickbooks, Salesforce, Slack, Smartsheet, Teamwork Projects, Trello, and Zendesk. The complete list is much longer than that, and if there's a tool that isn't supported, there's an API for creating custom integrations.
API access is valuable for teams with programming know-how. Those who lack the technical expertise to work with an API can instead turn to Zapier and IFTTT. These are self-service portals that help people create integrations and automations between apps and services. For example, you could create a rule using IFTTT or Zapier to connect Harvest and your Google Calendar, such that when a meeting starts in Google Calendar, Harvest will automatically log time for it.
Tops for Tracking Time
Harvest is an excellent time-tracking app for those who need invoicing and expensing tools, as well as light team management features, but not an all-encompassing project management platform. For that crowd, it's the Editors' Choice and the app I recommend. Harvest works well, is easy to use, and integrates with just about any other business app you might need. If Harvest's feature set is overkill, consider Toggl's free tier of service, which is an Editors' Choice as well.
Whether you're a freelancer who needs to need to track time and expenses, or you run a small business and need to manage team members and bill clients, Harvest handles it all.
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