Azhar Chougle sent me a tip about a billable-time-management service called Harvest, the same folks who run a service I really appreciate: Suprglu. This isn’t really my specialist field.
Harvest, put simply, allows people to track time spent on a project. This can be useful if you have contractors or such, as you can track the amount of billable time or time spent by individuals on certain projects. You get your own sub-domain at harvestapp.com (which is confusing, as the sign-up page is at getharvest.com) for your business.
I’m not an expert in this field, and I found it fairly confusing. The site expects you to already know lingo like timesheets, and how to use them. Though this is most probably fine for the businessman, for the hobbyist it’s impractical.
Harvest uses a bit of AJAX, though not as much as I’d like to see. I think this site could use AJAX a lot more, for example when switching between pages. The interface somehow reminds me of WordPress’, however, it doesn’t have as much AJAX.
I find Harvest’s colours a like too dark though, I want Web 2.0 blue like Tick (a competitor) uses. Tick is an interesting service, and Brian Benzinger has a review on it if you are interested.
Harvest has a free plan (1 user, 3 projects), but paid accounts cost between $5 and $99 per month. IMO, this is a little hefty.
Tags: harvest, web2.0, web2, web 2, web 2.0, business, productivity, time management
I checked out the Harvest site a little bit and I have to agree with you: it did appear very confusing — almost intimidating. There are several free widgets out there that also perform time-tracking duties. I use one from Yahoo that works just fine.
Looking at Tick, I actually prefer Tick, it looks much more modern.
Thanks for the credit for the tip
This was perfect timing. I had just started looking for a billing system for my business when I stumbled in here. Blogmad sent me here, but I’ll definitely be back.
Check out a service that is in public beta at the moment called 1time : online time tracking. It is ideally suited to professional service based companies.
I think a lot of different people and companies have different requirements and one product will fit one persons business process better than an other and vise-versa. 1time definitely fits a lot of peoples business process from Accountants to Web designers. We have 500 companies all over the world beta testing it at the moment. There is a lot more to come but i think it gives you a good starting point. I welcome any and all feedback from the blog community.
[...] SlimTimer is a lot simpler than Harvest, partially due to the fact it doesn’t rely on timesheets, and partially due to the fact it has a built-in timer like the desktop-software Rachota. [...]
Give 88 Miles a go. It is currently aimed at small business and freelancers, and as such doesn’t have a thousand features that you will never user. It just tracks time - pure and simple.
[...] to add tasks (and their length) to projects. I would stick to a proper time tracking solution, like Harvest or Tick. However, bringing invoicing and time tracking together is useful for [...]