Item: Harvest
Rating: 10
Author: Joe Hallissey

Overall Satisfaction with Harvest

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As our non-profit continues to grow both in mission and personnel, senior leadership desired to understand how some key groups spent their time. Specifically, how many work hours are spent on revenue vs. non-revenue projects. Harvest has helped quickly and easily provide reports to back up what were a rough estimation of hours spent on projects in the past.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Track time -- it just works. From starting and stopping a timer to entering hours after the fact, Harvest is a quick and easy solution for time tracking needs.
Setting up clients, projects, and tasks. Within your dashboard, there's a top-level tab to show all your open projects by client. Each project can be opened to drill down to tasks, budget, and people assigned.
Reporting -- whether you need a very basic report like us, or something more complex, Harvest has it all. From the reports tab, you can easily sort by person, task, project, and more.
Good pricing. At only $12 per month/user, it can fit in the budgets of even the smallest organizations that need time tracking.

Cons

No way to batch assign time to multiple employees. As a "project manager" within the system, I can go into any employee's timesheet and add or remove hours, but a situation I frequently face is that several employees are all working on the same task. I wish there was a way to assign them all the same entry in one go.

Return on Investment

Harvest allowed us to show senior leadership the true amount of time performing certain tasks that are resource-heavy.
Using the tool helps each team member better understand their own working patterns.
A negative impact is that tracking time on client projects also takes time! It's a hard habit to form if not doing so as part of the onboarding process.

Support Rating

When first trialing Harvest, we had a couple of questions about annual billing and adding new team members. The support team answered are questions in a fair amount of time in a clear way that didn't need any follow up from us. It was a good experience moving into actually purchasing the licenses.

Key Insights

Do you think Harvest delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Harvest's feature set?

Yes

Did Harvest live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Harvest go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Harvest again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Basecamp, Trello, Rafflecopter, OneNote

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are a freelancer or a small team looking to track time worked across projects, then Harvest is a good tool for you. It easily allows each person to select the client, project, and task with enough flexibility for a variety of use cases. Admins can choose what tasks are shown on a per-project basis or standardize across all projects.

On the other hand, I'm not sure if Harvest is the right tool for large organizations. There are too many small things an admin needs to do to each project/client that it would be difficult to do so across many people and clients.

Comments

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A right-priced time tracking tool for freelancers and small teams.