Harvest!

What brought Harvest in for the win? Namely the free acct, since I don’t do enough concurrent projects the price for the basic was bit steep at this time. But more than that, the iPhone/iNewton interface was nice, and the invoicing, superb.

Freshbooks invoicing was my biggest sticking point. Getting a PDF to attach was a PITA. I had to email myself the invoice as my client, which then presented a link to a PDF. Why I couldn’t just invoice and safe off as a PDF I dunno, but I couldn’t so that pushed Freshbooks out.

Apple Dashboard widgets are nice, I tried a few that were Freshbooks or Harvest friendly. Hated them all. I don’t hardly ever use my dashboard, so remembering to go in and stop a timer was a PITA.

The one thing I did like about Freshbooks, was a little pop up timer. Harvest has timers, but their in the site. Freshbooks allowed me to pop up a tiny window with the timer in it. that was I have to admit, very very handy.

So Harvest it is. NO regrest at this point, I’m very happy with it, I hope at some point to have enough reson to pay for it, because it is worth paying for if you’re a bigger player than I am, LOL.

Oh and the fact that Danny Wen, has commented here, and emailed me to help me with what I didn’t know about Harvest. That kind of thing goes a long way with me. It’s how I run 360Conferences, so I appreciate that level of dedication to the customer.

Harvest has a few really good “pros” I like that I don’t have to email the invoice to myself under the clients name in order to get access to it as a PDF. That’s huge. I also like the way the invoice looks.

The major “con”, is that it’s not free. OK OK I know, good things aren’t and you get what you pay for, which in this case seems to be a pretty good time tracking app. The other “con” for me is that I can’t have a timer. Freshbooks, has a nice little pop up that runs a javascript timer, which is pretty handy.

Freshbooks, is great in that it’s free. but it’s a huge PITA to have to put my email in for each client, and “email” them the invoice, just so I can get a PDF of it. In my work with UM, I submit an invoie through their intranet, so emailing an invoice is pointless. That’s a huge drawback.

Both apps seem to have one thing that I’ve either not figured out, or just doesn’t work like I expect. When generating an invoice from time tracked, It desn’t populate a quantity cost. Even though in freshbooks’ case the time I’m logging is against a work type with an hourly rate. WEIRD. If, when I’m in invoice mode I then select a type that has the right billable rate, it clears the description. LAME. so in both apps, i have to paste my rate in for each line item, that’s no fun.

I’m still not sure which service I’ll go with, which sucks, since that means I have to enter my time 2x, ACK, that sucks!!!

I think Harvest would be the clear winner if it wasn’t 30 bones a month.