Harvest

Harvest is the timesheet management product from the Ney York City small design and tech studio Iridesco, Inc.. From what I was able to do with the free 30 day trial that allows 10 users and 10 projects provided a simple but solid interface and reports. Ok enough of the PR stuff here's the real deal.

When you sign up your asked for your company name, email address, password, and acceptance of terms and privacy notice no big deal. Then of your sent to your sub-domain site Harvest creates for you from your company name a la mycompanyname.harvestapp.com. When you get there you will see three tabs - Reports, Timesheets, and Manage. You will first want to load your Users names and each one of your Projects into the timesheet management system of course. So from the Manage tab you get sub tabs for Projects, People, Tasks, and Account Details which are self explanatory but in case you need more details.

Projects view, add, and edit projects that are both active and inactive.

People view, add, and edit Employees plus you can add your Contractors too.

Tasks view, add, and edit tasks both Common Tasks such as Admin and Project Management but Other Tasks as well, for example recruiting, marketing, or advertising.

Account Details summarizes your company name which you can change, your plan also you can change, your plan details. It also allows you to toggle Alerts for those who you want to be notified when changes are being made to your account. You can Export Data in .csv (common-seperated values) file format for spreadsheet manipulation. From here you can close your account once your 29 days for free trail are over.

Moving along to the Timesheets tab once your done exploring the Manage tab. This will probably be where you spend most your time when dealing with any timesheet management system. Here you can view what and where your employees, contractors, and yourself are. Plus your able to see how much time they are spending do each task and project. This is how it works fro the Daily sub-tab you select a Project and Task from the drop down lists, enter the time duration you took spending on that particular event or you can leave it blank to start the time tracker automactically. Enter in some additional notes for review and then click Add entry. This is then sent to the Pending Approval for Review. You can also view the Unsubmitted tab to view who has not submitted a timesheet. There are two other tabs for viewing purposes named Weekly and Archive.

Which leads us to the bread and butter called Reports which I personally think is a very influential part of choosing a timesheet. Why you may ask, well its because this is what you hand to your Client and/or store in your filing cabinet. This is were you should be able to view everything from one location. At the Reports tab you can view reports by an assortment of options, by week, month, year to date, last month, last year, or current time frame. In each option you can click to view by total, billiable, non-billiable, employee, and contractor. Just look for your self.

The Review

From what I got in the free 30 day trial I was very pleased with the available options considering I either work alone or with a couple of buddies most of the time. My only problem with Harvest timesheet management system are the reports it generates, they are very simple in that they print out bar graphs of information which you can see in the graphic on top, but thats it. No logo implementation, color scheme chooser to fit with your company brand, no customization at all. Why have generic report print outs when you can just export the .csv file and manipulate the information, why export the file and manipulate it if you can just create your own, so why have the timesheet managment system when you can create and manage your own spreadsheet. Oh yeah its easier and online, man I almost lost it there, but you get what I'm saying right. You can read more about Harvest at The Harvest Gazette. Well anyways as far as my recommendation goes I have to say until the customization factor is added I would pick a different timesheet management system.

technorati tags:timesheet, timetracking, harvest, timemanagement

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