Harvest Reviews

Harvest was FANTASTIC, but with the recent updates of the past month or so, it’s almost unusable. I’ve switched to using just the desktop site, as Harvest doesn’t update internally to reflect new projects in the system, doesn’t update when projects and times are edited after initially posting, some times doesn’t post a submitted time at all, and doesn’t reflect the running month total anymore. It’s super clunky now, not intuitive. It feels like a major step backward in technology. I have to use this for my work, so I’ll continue to use the desktop site out of necessity. But I might just delete Harvest now, as it simply doesn’t work. Prior to these new graphic and mechanical overhauls, it was amazing. I would have given it 5 stars. If you guys want to keep your app customers, please revert back to your old systems, or just lightly update the old systems, instead of completely removing features and bogging down the servers. This is ridiculous!

EDIT: The developer replied to this review, so I updated Harvest following that. And the issues are still NOT solved.

So sorry to see the change to the new app. So many useful features and capabilities gone. For example, invoices pending no longer show the due date in the list.
When I opened Harvest to start tracking time today, it opened to yesterday and I started tracking time on the wrong day- no warning or request for confirmation that I wanted to track on a day in the past.
Starting and stopping the timer creates multiple tracking instances of the same project on a single day.
Just a mess. Did you have any user testing or feedback?
Recommend rolling back to the old version until you can call this one an improvement. Please don’t reply to this review with your standard answer I’ve seen on all the others. I’m not interested in looking for future releases when you had a perfectly good app to start with.

Not quite sure how anyone in your development team could feel the latest upgrade is an improvement. It shows far less information and the screen doesn’t even seem to fit my phone. I have tried within the settings to fix that but have not been successful yet. But the worst part is the complete lack of information I used to have such as billing rates and amount earned. I received an email saying you had made many suggested revisions, which means others have complained about this upgrade as well but even when I updated to the latest version, it still is far worse than the old version. I understand the need to always try and improve your product, but the key word there is improve, not lessen.

this app is a pretty good timer, and I’ve always really liked the web interface, but the latest rewrite of this iOS app is really lacking in many areas.

Firstly, Harvest was rewritten using a technology called React Native, which has had a detremental effect on the usability of Harvest . Screens are glitchy, don’t load all the data in a way that makes sense, and shows old data all the time. Buttons also don’t work half the time that they are tapped. Starting and stopping timers (the main functionality of the mobile app) now takes at least double the time as before, as now I open Harvest and have to manually refresh the “Time” page to make sure that things are up-to-date before actually stopping the timer.

Additionally, they’ve completely broken the “Stop my timer” Siri Shortcut. Such a simple piece of functionality and yet it never works.

This update went backwards in so many ways.

I have loved Harvest and would have given it 5 stars for the past two years. But the new update is awful. When entering time, I can no longer search by client name, can no longer easily just type time spent (I calculate to the minute) because there is no “:” button on the screen, and when I add a description of the activity, I can’t see what I’m typing due to the interface hiding it. And twice it has changed the client selected to the last client I had selected!, making me paranoid I’m going to bill time incorrectly to the wrong client. Ugh! Fix it quick or go back to the old app, please.

I’ve used this app for the better part of a year and really loved how simple it was to use and issue invoices. There were some things I didn’t love, but that’s any app. The latest upgrade makes it a lot harder to use, and I will be looking for something else. I used to be able to track time by project, and then my month, quarter or year. Now I can only track by week. The UI was not improved. It’s more difficult to find things that used to be easy to find. I’m not even sure now if I can create an invoice from Harvest at all. The form to fill out task details is not as useful. It sounds like other users have the same feedback.

I appreciate the speedy update to adding back additional timeframes for reporting. But you’re still missing a key component—money! It’s not terribly helpful to see how many hours I’ve worked if I can’t also see money earned. I bill at different rates, so that’s important. Basically, if you can just put Harvest back the way it was and make improvements to that… that’s a good rule of thumb. Make a great product, which is what you had, better. Don’t obliterate your product into something unidentifiable and then expect customers to be happy when you give them back pieces of what they’ve had for years.

A time tracker has one job, track time. However, Harvest provides the ability to do other unnecessary things when basic features are broken-ish? If I stop Harvest from my desktop or a iOS widget, it doesn't stop it in Harvest . I open Harvest and see it still going. The other crucial feature is a button large enough to click! The iOS widget has tons of screen real estate and a tiny button, Harvest has a tiny button. Seriously, follow iOS design guidelines and common sense. These two issues should be solved before you release Harvest .

It is a well polished app and I have not run into any bugs. I believe it is short on some UX features, however. If there is a way to look at your week or month I can’t find it. I work on a very sporadic basis and need to be able to look at a month then from there go into adding or editing time tracking for a project. This would bump it up to a four star app. More options/hyperlinks for editing/adding time tracking from the reports section would potentially move it to five stars. Overall a good app and I am able to make it work when used in conjunction with a calendar. I don’t like having to do the manual tracking in a calendar on top of this though.

A while back they redid Harvest and made it cache and display old timers. I’m often staring and stopping timers from multiple clients. Sometimes a timer shows an old value before the new one is fetched - then if you start the timer you loose data.

Should either be an error or disallowed until sync. Harvest is one of the use cases for investing in good sync tech and they still haven’t.

For me, the best part of this service occurs on the back end, tallying the hours logged using Harvest .

You can log your hours thru the web or the iPhone app, and then feed that info into your projects and ultimately into your invoices.

The iPhone app works well for capturing your hours with timers, but is stripped down when it comes to reporting & management - the web interface is much more full featured for that, and is where you need to do the setup for your invoicing and other project & reporting related features.

So, I find the iPhone app an indispensable complement to the HarvestApp service as a whole, and I find the service subscription cost reasonable (under $150/yr) given the ease it allows for invoicing, project tracking and historical review of work detail.

I’ve had some issues over the years as the develop has changed features, but they’ve been pretty responsive to user feedback to address problems.

Very straightforward, easy to use time tracking app. I keep it open on my phone or iPad and just start/stop the task timers as I change tasks. Super simple.

Just a couple of enhancement requests.
PLEASE update Harvest so that it will rotate to a landscape view on the iPad. (Without this I have to use the web app to log in which defeats the purpose of downloading Harvest .)

Cannot do data entry or type in notes with my Smart Keyboard very well when app is stuck in portrait mode.

Please allow the option to copy forward last week’s (or even yesterday’s) tasks from within Harvest . This is a nice feature in the Web application when using the Weekly view and moving to the start of a new week. But, if you forget to do this (aren’t in the Web app) on Monday, then I don’t think you have any opportunity to copy forward your last set of tasks. Would be a helpful timesaver.

Add these features and its 5 stars.

I’ve been using the this app app for over 3 years and have been mostly pleased but lately I’ve been having an issue with the timer not stopping.

My supervisor called me at home, because he knew I had finished my shift, to let me know that my timer was still running. I took the blame, my bad, I probably forgot to stop it. But then it happened again, and again, and again.

Luckily I use a mileage tracking app so I can see the exact time I depart a work site and head to a different job. This way I am able to go back and fix my time. But it shouldn’t be happening in the first place.

Harvest is great - has been a game changer for keeping track of my time in between projects for my small business. I’m a woodworker and balance several projects at once - I tried QuickBooks time for a while, it was okay but not well suited for a team of one or two people and lacked a bunch of critical features which Harvest provides. Harvest lets me change back and forth between project to project so I know exactly how my time is being allocated, and I can figure out how much of my budget is left for a given job. This is no deal breaker - but one feature that would be nice is to have the roll clock available when ur inputting your time, in case you forget to clock in for a certain job. But this is a super miner suggestion, and I’m sure I’ll just end up getting used to the way it is now. Second to that would just be to display the time of day that you clock in/out of a job. Helps provide some further insight end analytics.

I’ve been using this app now for four years of the six years my business has been open. I think it is a fabulous tool. I truly believe the people who developed the software really did try to think of everything. Timekeeping is extremely easy, running reports for invoices is a breeze, running monthly, quarterly, yearly and custom reports for a range of project tracking and accounting is also a breeze. The expense feature took me a little time to figure out, but once I did, it’s extremely easy to use. The retainer feature is my only complaint, but the tool does provide a work around if needed.

I’ve also had to reach out to this app a couple of times to figure something out, but they have been very quickly responsive, informative and very courteous. I really can’t say enough good things about this app. When we hire people, we give them a 30-minute training on the tool and our time- and expense-keeping policies. Within 15 minutes they have it down. It also has a lot of customizable options, as well. You really can make this tool fit your specific business. I tremendously recommend it.

Harvest does the job I need to track time spent on various work. Switching the count clock between tasks is easy. We use JIRA & this tracks actual time work to such fine level that it’s impressive. Helps to see how much time is actually spent (always not what you think). Once I get into the habit of switching the counter clock between each task, it actually makes the work day much more productive because I don’t have a Task for Slacking Off to Check Twitter & have to switch to a productive task instead. :)

I love this app on the iPhone, Harvest is simple and easy! It’s a joy to use. Coupled with the web version’s clean invoice generation Harvest is just awesome!

One suggestion that I would ask the developers to improve Harvest is the note entry for a time entry. If you have notes about a task that are more than a few lines it doesn’t expand the text view, it’s make it difficult and cumbersome to add bulleted or longer descriptions scrolling in a tiny text view. Please if you could make the text field expand in place or be like a separate view that pops up when you tap would be amazing!! Thanks!

We tend to be always chasing the next big app that will be a game changer on productivity. Yes I include myself in my Productivity Porn addict community and I would like to high recommend this app as part of the 12-Step program. It is the most frictionless tracking system that I have used and I tried a lot that easily provides a good mix of seamless tracking time on and off devices synchronized in all platforms. Give it a shot to see if it fits your lifestyle

The previous version worked. If the update worked, the new interface would be fine. Although I don’t like it better than the last one.
Bugs:
Does not suns as well or as quickly with the desktop version
Start and stop laggy and unpredictable.
Refreshing does not help sync. Only thing that works is to start one of the timers, even if that’s not the one that you’re working on.

For about 20 years I’ve been using a custom built time management software. I decided to convert over to this app and it’s been quite an effort to do so. I’ve sent several suggestions in about the things they could do to make it easier but I always get the feedback that that particular option or enhancement is not in consideration. It amazes me that companies are so quick to just rule out any type of feedback especially from someone as myself who has developed and use these types of software’s for years. I know personally the things that make using it easier but they simply will not consider any enhancements. The other thing this very frustrating is they provide new phone support. There are substantial bugs in the product but you can actually talk to anyone or do a screen share so they can see it and they’re not the least bit concerned about knowing it or documented it. The CEO was missing in action. He doesn’t care about his product. I get that it’s an inexpensive way of tracking time but you would think they would show more pride in their work. I spent six months converting 18 years worth of data so I’m kind of stuck with it. There are features that I like about it so I didn’t want to say that. And I also know you get what you pay for. But it amazes me that there are absolutely no interest by them to enhance their product.