PAST THE PUNCH-IN

How a great app can help you track time like a pro.

BY ADAM G. CHAIKIN, CPA/CITP, CGMA

TECHNOLOGY

The days of punching a time card may be long gone, but tracking time is getting more high-tech than ever.

From time to time, we all come across an app or a program that just works so well we want to share it with everyone. Over the last six months I had such an experience, and did some further investigation to share with the readers of Disclosures. I own a small consulting practice that specializes in areas where accounting, finance and technology meet. My work includes the use of subcontractors where necessary. All of my projects are billed on a time and materials basis. For that reason, the accurate capture of time for me, my employees and my subcontractors is very important.

I first stumbled upon Harvest (www.getharvest.com) as a subcontractor to a Tysons Corner consulting firm called Synaptitude Consulting. On this contract, I was a project manager for an important client that needed a web-based dashboard to be created. Upon joining, I was provided with log-in credentials to Harvest to track my time. I became hooked shortly thereafter.

The most appealing aspect of the app is its ease of use. At the start, keeping accurate time records should not be the difficult to begin with. The user interface is crisp and clean and achieves the task without any introduction. Further, the menu-driven access is intuitive and easy to follow. As a project manager, I have access to reports and dashboards that give me instant insight to what my team is working on.

I was also impressed by the app’s accessibility. I can log in through my web browser or on a phone or tablet. In addition, I can record time in the Google Chrome browser plug-in. This is one of the coolest features I have seen in a long time — you can record time without leaving your current browser page. And you have two options: You can either enter a number of hours that you have worked or you can start a timer to track time of what you are doing.

After using the app on the job at Synaptitiude, I adopted it for my firm. I currently use it across a half dozen projects. In addition to time capture, I use it for creating estimates and billing my customers. I have reduced the amount of time spent on both of these tasks by using Harvest, which is why I feel more people can get a productivity boost out of the system.

Harvest is integrated with a number of useful applications, including Trello (https://trello.com) and JIRA. I use both of these applications in my daily work. Trello is a cloud-based organization tool that is closely aligned with Agile project management. JIRA is part of the Atlassian (https://www.atlassian. com) toolset, which is commonly used by software developers. Both of these tools are worthy of further investigation.

Having enjoyed Harvest so much, I interviewed Harvest co-founder Danny Wen to learn more about the app and how it can help CPAs.

CAN YOU TELL ME A LITTLE ABOUT YOURSELF AND YOUR ROLE AT HARVEST?

My name is Danny Wen and I’m the cofounder of Harvest. My good friend Shawn Liu and I started Harvest in 2006 as an offshoot to our small design and technology consultancy. Our background is in computer science but we both love design, so we founded a company centered on design and technology, which allows us to practice both crafts. Because of the traction Harvest was able to gain in its first year, we stopped our consulting business and for the last seven years have focused 100 percent on nurturing and growing Harvest.

We’re now a company of over 30 people spanning around the world (see http://www. getharvest.com/made-on-earth) and my dayto-day is focused on supporting our teams on a variety of things, from product to marketing to recruiting.

WHAT IS THE IDEAL CLIENT FOR HARVEST — IS THERE A CERTAIN MARKET YOU ARE TARGETING? HOW MANY USERS DO YOU HAVE?

We focus on building a great product for businesses that have between five and 50 employees. This focus allows us to keep things simple and lightweight, but build enough sophistication to really make things more effective for teams. That said, we’re fortunate to attract customers on either end of that spectrum. Freelancers and really small businesses like using Harvest because they see it used by their slightly larger and more established counterparts. They know it’s a service that can grow with them. Larger companies are drawn to the simplicity and speed that smaller companies get to have, and they want to bring that ease to their staff. Asking people to track or enter time is never a fun thing, but if large employers can make that easy on their staff, they’ll end up with better data and reports.

WHAT ARE THE VARIOUS PRICE POINTS FOR HARVEST?

It’s basically $10 per user, per month. u

TECHNOLOGY

Asking people to track or enter time is never a fun thing, but if large employers can make that easy on their staff, they’ll end up with better data and reports.

— Danny Wen, Harvest co-founder

The only exceptions are if you’re on our solo plan (it’s $12 a month) or if you subscribe to our yearly plans, you receive a 10 percent discount off all our prices. And if you are a large company, we also work with you on volume discounts.

HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT FOCUSING ON THE MARKET OF CPAs OR THEIR CLIENTS?

We’ve definitely looked into it. CPAs play an important role in our customers’ businesses. What we’ve found so far is that if a CPA practice has a lot of professional services clients, which tends to be a great fit for us just because those are the workflows our offerings really optimize. We’re open to working with more CPAs directly and welcome folks to reach out if they want to talk more about that.

HOW DOES HARVEST DETERMINE WHAT PROGRAMS IT INTEGRATES WITH? SOME OF THE INTEGRATIONS THAT WORK BEST FOR ME ARE RELATED TO AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT, SUCH AS TRELLO AND JIRA. HOW DID YOU IDENTIFY THESE PARTNERS AND WHAT IS NEXT FOR YOUR APPLICATION?

We look at what our customers are using. Our goal is to be a seamless part of our customers’ ecosystem. We’re not going build every function that a small business needs, so we simply want to make sure we’re integrated into the right places so we can offer a smooth experience all around.

One important thing to mention is that we work hard to provide not just an integration, but a great integration experience. That means really understanding what the workflows are for our customers and creating an integration experience that maps to that reality. We don’t want to just import or export a few things via an API and call that an integration; it’s important that we consider the user experience and identify what our customers really need out of that integration. As for what’s next, we’re working on two major things. The first is helping Harvest customers get an even better grasp of how effective and profitable their projects are. We’re doing this by introducing a new set of reports and ability to track costs associated with a project.

The second major thing we’re doing is creating a new product called Harvest Forecast (www. getharvest.com/forecast). If you’re running a consulting or professional services team, we want you to have a truly effective way to plan your team’s schedule and utilization. We’ve created a visual and seamless way to coordinate who’s working on what and when. It’s time planning for the modern age. With it connected to Harvest, you have a powerful combination to plan and track projects.

Our ultimate goal here is simple: If you are using Harvest tools to run your professional services business, we want you to operate with insights that were previously really difficult to get with any solution [such as]: How profitable are my fixed fee projects? Which clients are my best clients? How are we doing against our estimates and budgets? Who is overbooked and when do we need to hire?

Both of these initiatives are in beta and we’re looking forward to sharing them with all our customers soon.

HARVEST IS VERY ACCOMMODATING FOR THE MOBILE USER. I USE IT ON BOTH MY IPAD AND MY IPHONE, NOT TO MENTION THE GOOGLE CHROME PLUG-IN. CAN YOU TELL ME A LITTLE ABOUT YOUR MOBILE STRATEGY AND WHO YOU HOPE TO TARGET WITH IT?

Our mobile strategy is simple. Just about everyone in the modern workforce has a smartphone now, so we want to make available some of the core Harvest features right on mobile devices so it’s available to them anywhere anytime.

With things like time tracking, we aim to build a tool not just for the managers or business

TECHNOLOGY

The Harvest app time-tracking interface is easy to use.

owners, but also the end users who have to actually enter time. These are the people who have to do this tedious thing and we want to make it really easy for them. Sometimes that’s on the desktop, but sometimes they forgot to enter something and being able to do that on their smartphone when they have a free moment is simply very useful.

So our target is simply anyone who appreciates using modern technology to make their lives easier.

ON APRIL 17, YOU ANNOUNCED THE INTEGRATION OF HARVEST WITH QUICKBOOKS ONLINE. WHO IS YOUR MAIN COMPETITOR IN THAT MARKET? WHAT ADVANTAGES DO YOU HAVE?

There are a couple very timesheet-focused players who have built on top of QuickBooks. I think where we’re different [is] in three areas. First, we’ve been around for eight years now, and in that time have put tremendous focus on design and ease-of-use for our users. This is reflected in how we’ve made this easy for the user: from tracking time on the web to mobile to other applications, it really is as convenient as possible. The second area is the focus on helping customers turn that time into meaningful, actionable reports so they can better plan their next project or better converse with their clients about budget by supporting it with data. Lastly, we’ve built invoicing to allow our users to manage client relationships that have different billing rates easy. The sum of these key areas really make Harvest a truly solid service for small businesses. Currently, and it’s been less than a month so far, thousands of customers are using our QuickBooks integration. The uptake was fast as many customers have been eagerly anticipating this one.

ARE YOU CONSIDERING ANY INTEGRATION PARTNERS IN THE PAYROLL PROCESSING ARENA?

Most of our customers rely on salaried employees with occasional contractors, rather than part-time employees, so we haven’t seen a huge need on the payroll front. That said, we know there’s something to consider here, so we welcome input from CPAs on this.

AS YOU CAN TELL I AM HOOKED ON HARVEST FOR MY BUSINESS. HOWEVER, IS THERE FUNCTIONALITY YOU THINK HARVEST HAS THAT I MAY HAVE OVERLOOKED?

Harvest does a great job of creating invoices that you can send online. We call these Web Invoices. The great things about Web Invoices is that you can enable online payment as well. When you have this turned on, we found that most of our customers see their invoices paid twice as fast versus having to wait for a check in the mail. By offering that convenience to their clients, it speeds up their collection time which means better cash flow. That’s an awesome feature that sometimes people overlook just because they don’t know about it or haven’t tried it yet.

HOW MANY PAYING CUSTOMERS DO YOU CURRENTLY HAVE?

As a private company, we don’t share specifics here. What I can tell you is that we have, and appreciate, the tens of thousands of paying customers now in over 100 countries.

A CUSTOMER TESTIMONIAL

Having had such a good discussion with Danny, I also spoke to another user of the system: John Karanikolas, managing partner at Synaptitude Consulting. I wanted to make sure the readers had a fair and balanced report. u

TECHNOLOGY

CPAs play an important role in our customers’ businesses. A CPA practice has a lot of professional services clients, which tends to be a great fi t for us. Those are the workfl ows our offerings really

optimize. — Danny Wen

DID YOU EVALUATE ANY OTHER TIME CAPTURE SOLUTIONS BEFORE USING HARVEST?

Yes, we evaluated a number of other products. We were looking for products that would integrate directly with Google Apps and be easy to use. We searched in the Google App marketplace for contenders and did “tryouts” for the fi nalists.

WHAT LED YOU TO CHOOSE HARVEST?

It had the simplest interface that would make it the most straightforward for our staff to enter their time. We wanted to ensure that we wouldn’t be putting roadblocks in place for people to record their time accurately. We didn’t need an enormous feature set — we wanted simple and easy to use.

DID THE INTEGRATION WITH THE ATLASSIAN TOOL SET OR ANY OTHER SOFTWARE FACTOR IN YOUR DECISION?

Th e integration with Google Apps was the major factor. We did not integrate with Atlassian until aft er Harvest had already been in place.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE BEST FEATURE THAT HARVEST HAS TO OFFER?

Th e simplicity. It is easily understood with virtually no learning curve. Th e simplest solution is just to write your time on a piece of paper and hand it in at the end of the week. Th is was the closest we could get to that in an integrated format.

IS THERE ANY BIT OF FUNCTIONALITY THAT YOU JUST DON'T LIKE?

Yes, timesheets can only be submitted by the week. For billing purposes, it would be helpful to allow timesheets to be submitted at the end of the month, even if that day does not come at the end of the week. It would also be helpful to enable project managers to mark specifi c time as being billable or non-billable, instead of only allowing the person recording the time to make that determination.

WHAT INTEGRATIONS WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE IN THE FUTURE, IF ANY?

We are happy with the level of integration that exists presently. It would be nice to have a Windows desktop widget to record time. Currently you can do that with a Chrome plug-in, but having a taskbar icon would be great. n

Disclaimer: Th ought2Execution LLC has a paid subscription for the Harvest application for fi ve users. I have received no compensation from Harvest or any vendor in this article. Th ese opinions are my own.

ADAM CHAIKIN, CPA/CITP, CGMA is founder and principal of Th ought2Execution LLC, a Virginiabased consulting fi rm specializing in fi nance, project management and ERP systems implementations. * Adam.Chaikin@ Th ought2Execution.com connect.vscpa.com/AdamChaikin linkedin.com/in/adamgchaikin linkedin.com/in/adamgchaikin @Th ought2Execute