This is a handy little feature to manage your tasks.  Go to Manage > Tasks.  Click on any task - you’ll see a little trash icon next to the task name.

The trash icon does 2 things: if you have not tracked any time under this task, it’ll let you remove the task entirely.  If anyone in your account has tracked time towards the task, then it’ll offer you the option to archive the task.

What does it mean to archive a task?

First, you won’t be able to track time to that task anymore.  Second, you won’t be able to add that task to any projects.  If you change your mind - simply go to Manage Tasks, click on “Manage archived tasks”, and you’ll be able re-activate them.

There’s a new section for managing your clients and contacts.

Go to Manage > Clients, and you’ll find all your clients listed out in alphabetical order. Next to each client name you’ll see two links – “Edit” and “Add contact”.

Edit – edit the client’s name and contact info.

Add contact – add a client contact (you can add however many as you’d like). When creating an invoice for the client, you’ll be able to choose from these contacts to send the invoice to.

The Manage Clients section also serves as a light, easy-to-use address book, and with that in mind, we display email and phone numbers for each client contact for quick access.

We’re happy to announce that with the Harvest Spring Update, the long-awaited invoicing feature is now available for all Harvest plans!

Here’s a quick look at what invoicing is like in Harvest:

• Create invoices directly from time and expenses entered into Harvest. With a few clicks in the invoice creation wizard, you’ll have a pre-populated invoice with just the amount of detail you want to show your clients on a invoice (from general summaries to detailed line items). You are also able to adjust your line-times as necessary before sending off. Simple yet flexible for your different needs.
• Create free-form invoices for anything. Your line-items don’t need to be time-based. Our free-form invoices allow you to enter sales of products, fixed-fee services, or any other categories you may want to define for your business.
• Send PDF invoices via e-mail. Sending invoices directly from Harvest is easy. Invoices sent are automatically tracked on your Invoicing Dashboard and your clients get a clean PDF version of your invoice with your customized logo (if you provided one) on it. If you’d rather email the PDF yourself, you can simply download the PDF version of your invoice from Harvest.
• Log payments, full or partial. Our invoicing module helps you stay on top of what’s been paid and what is still due, even when you are dealing with partial payments toward an invoice.
• Activity log for accurate records. The activity log tracks when your invoice was sent, any notes or comments you may want to associate with the invoice, partial payments, and closing dates, so you are sure to have accurate records of all transactions for your invoices.
• Invoicing Dashboard, your financial view at a glance. Our invoicing dashboard helps you see what’s outstanding, what’s past due, and what’s coming up—all at a glance. Click into the invoices archive to see full reports of your activity for the month, quarter, year, or any timeframe of your choosing.

We’re very excited to unveil this new capability and we hope you too will find Harvest Invoicing to be a simple and effective tool for your billing needs.

Don’t have a Harvest account yet? Try it out and upgrade within the next 30 days of this announcement with the coupon code HARVESTINVOICING and you’ll receive $10 off your first month’s bill!

This is just Part 2 of the new features we’re highlighting in the Harvest Spring Update. Stay tuned for more bits about all the great new things that’s now in the latest release of Harvest!

While we love our Harvest orange and that blue-green color (which reminds of the ocean), we thought our customers (you) would appreciate the ability to customize their own Harvest account to a color scheme that speaks more to their company’s look.  So we’ve added a new feature to pick from a set of six, delicious color combos: the Harvest classic blue, Harvest orange theme, and four solid colors - red, green, blue, and black/grayscale.

We hope you’ll have fun with this new feature!

This is just Part 1 of the new features we’re highlighting in the Harvest Spring Update. Stay tuned for more bits about all the great new things that’s now in the latest release of Harvest!

With Spring fast approaching here in New York City, we’re happy to unveil all the improvements we’ve been making to Harvest during the winter. We see Harvest as a small business companion, a one-stop app to get your business up and running. With the Spring Update, we’re one giant step closer to that reality.

Here’s a brief overview of what we’ve done. We’ll be highlighting the details of the Spring Update in the coming week with individual posts about each area!

Harvest Spring Update Highlights

• Harvest Invoicing arrives. Now invoice for your time with ease and just a few clicks. General invoice module also allows you to create invoices for products or services that you don’t track time for. Generate PDFs, track your invoices in a dashboard, and conveniently send invoices all right from within Harvest.
• Customize your Harvest look-and-feel. If that blue/yellow color scheme never worked for you, you can now choose form a variety of color schemes that match your company’s branding.
• Better client management. Keeping a list of your clients and contact information in Harvest is now a whole lot easier. And with the handy invoicing module, you’ll now be able to send invoices to your clients directly from Harvest with ease.
• Updated pricing. With all the great upgrades in Harvest’s Spring Update, we also updated the prices on our plans to reflect the new integrate package. Current customers continue to pay for Harvest at their current plan prices, but now have the added ability to add as many or as few people onto their plans on a price per person basis. Just hired a new person but you’ve max’d out your plan? Adding an extra user to your Business plan is easy to do and costs only $5 per person per month.

We’ll highlight these changes further next week. For now, try out the new bits in the Spring Update and let us know if you have any questions!

Zendesk, a professional help desk application, just announced its integration with Harvest for time tracking. This allows current Zendesk users to easily log time entries (with ticket reference details) to Harvest as they work on their help tickets.

To use Harvest with your Zendesk account, follow the simple setup directions here: Configuring Harvest Time Tracking in Zendesk

What Is Zendesk?
Zendesk lets you support your clients, customers and end-users via a simple and intuitive web interface with full e-mail integration. If you are looking for an elegant way to handle support for your product or service, we recommend taking a look at Zendesk.

Harvest and Zendesk integration was made possible by the Harvest API and Zendesk API.

Did you know Harvest also integrates with other great products like Basecamp (project management) and QuickBooks (accounting)? Configure these integrations under Manage > Account details in your Harvest account.

Harvest Invoicing – billing for your time is about to get a whole lot easier. Coming soon.

In many countries of the world, today (Feb 14th) is Valentine’s Day. It’s a day to show that special someone you care with a gesture or a gift. Here at Harvest, we’d like to give a little something extra to our Solo users to show that we care; starting today, all Solo accounts will have 20 projects instead of 10.

We’ve always believed in helping small business and upstarts. Our New Founders Program has been helping small businesses get under way for the last year and a half. And with this Valentine’s Surprise, it’s our way of cheering on the many freelancers currently using Harvest. You may be a company of one, but you are in our hearts today! Thank you for your support and here’s to the good year ahead.

Note: All Basic and Business accounts already have the capacity to track an unlimited number projects. See Harvest Pricing for details on all our plans.

The latest addition to the Harvest New Founders Program is Poppy Copy, a copywriting studio in Brighton. Relly Annett-Baker started her career as a writer for music media outlet, and later wrote for the web when she joined her husband’s web design company. Poppy Copy came into being last year (2007), and Relly now runs her own company on the top floor of her townhouse.

We’re excited to present New Founders Program’s very first copywriting studio. In the following interview, Relly gave a few tips for all of us small business owners, explained why time tracking (and Harvest) is important for copywriters (thank you, Douglas Adams), and we coaxed her into telling us the secret behind the environmentally concerned bee.

Continue Reading »

We just released a new version of the Harvest widget for the Yahoo! Widget Engine. It’s stable, responsive, and plays well with the latest widget engine. So if you’re currently using the Yahoo! widget, please upgrade to enjoy the new improvements under the hood.

Whether you are on a Mac, Windows XP, or Windows Vista, we have your time tracking needs covered with our widgets and gadgets.