Harvest

Avantages

It just works. Creating an offer, turning it into an invoice, setting everything up... it just works easy. In contrast with many software you can use for invoicing, Harvest doesn't try to do it all, it just keeps things simple. Probably too simple at times, but I never ran into any issues as we have straightforward product & services lines to add to our invoices.

Inconvénients

The fact that the time tracking is included and cannot be ignored as easily as the optional planning tool (that they sell separately) was a small frustration at first. Afterwards, I just tended to directly surf to the Invoices overview and avoid the timetracking part all together.

For some it is probably thé selling feature as time tracking looks very easy, but our company doens't keep track of detailed time tracking so we never used that part thoroughly.

Avantages

I started using it because I did not find the timekeeping functions of Quickbooks easy enough to use. On that point, Harvest is much better--it is excellent at keeping track of time. In addition, Harvest makes it quite easy to bill clients for time and to follow up with repeated billings if needed.

Inconvénients

I'll mention two things. First, the method of dealing with retainers needs some serious work to be useful for lawyers. If I have an outstanding invoice and a client sends me a retainer, I cannot have payment toward the invoice taken out of the retainer without a fairly convoluted process. Second, it is hard to integrate with Quickbooks. I need Quickbooks (or I suppose, something similar) to keep track of all my financial records. But when I am using Harvest for timekeeping and billing, I wind up making many of the entries twice.

Avantages

So overall I'm not a fan. That said, documenting expenses is the best I've ever seen in Harvest. It's really well done and simple. Nice and clean, get your photos, get your monies and go. Big fan.

That is where my love affair ends with this app.

From an administrative point, maybe there are incredible advantages over other offerings. The world may have never experienced such a revolutionary piece of software and I, in turn, am a simpleton; stuck in a world of misunderstanding.

Inconvénients

If you write a app which tracks hourly time and tries to put it into buckets for easy expensing, the time-tracking app should be simple for the multitude of non-admin users. Simply put, it's cumbersome and annoying.... and I say that because someone is going to take stronger language less seriously.

Forget the fact that you have to enter in time _Daily_. When I say daily, I don't mean that you click on the day, you do the thing and save. I mean that it shows you one day per page at a time. No calendar to quickly go through a week, no monthly review where you can quickly fill in gaps. One page == one day. You can bring stuff over from the last-entered day, but the hours aren't filled in... just the buckets. This leads to an incredibly slow, painful, and frankly uninteresting experience. For a bunch of users who want to do their job instead of fiddling around with tracking how long they've done their job, asking them to use Harvest is basically asking them to make none of their time billable unless threatened with homelessness. It's incredibly painful to use.

To be sure, I'm not a fan of time-tracking apps anyway. I akin them to asking your employees to lie to you and giving them a form in which to do it... but Harvest makes the fun of lying to your employer the low-light of your day. It's not fair.

Avantages

i like how there's a free version because it is not necessary to always purchase the paid version unless you are managing a large group of people.

it is simple to track time and add hours. to set up categories for your hours is very simple too. the tutorials are helpful & customer support answers fairly quickly.

Inconvénients

sometimes when you bill an invoice in between two months, it doesn't always count your hours from the previous month, hence you are only billing in the current month. for example, if the week starts in september but ends in october that sunday, then you will be billed for that october, hence not billing for september. i found a way around it, but it is rather annoying.

Avantages

Exceptionally easy to use. Intuitive interface design that's obviously been user tested and refined. Every button and feature is exactly where you'd expect it to be.

Inconvénients

This software does one thing really well – timekeeping. We've tried using solutions that try to do more and have gone back to Harvest because there's nothing we don't like about it.