Image via istockphoto
Written by Eric Gockel
We’re always trying and testing apps here at cre8 and like to share our experiences with our customers and followers. We recently helped one of our clients start using Harvest for their invoicing too.
Harvest Overview
We’ve been using Harvest for years at the office and love how easy it is to track time and send invoices. We also use the Chrome plugin to integrate it with our Basecamp account projects.
My favorite feature is that I can just click the start timer button next to a task in Basecamp. But I’ve always pined for more data, like quickly seeing how many hours I’ve logged against a task.
When you click the timer button in Basecamp, the popup does show the total hours tracked against it, and it’s possible via the reports in Harvest.
But if you’ve closed a task and want to see the total hours in Basecamp, you need to re-open it (and mess up your ‘activity’ in Basecamp).
Everhour Features
With Everhour, it’ll show your accumulated time before the task name. If you click on it, it will also show you a breakdown of everyone who logged time against a task, which is super handy if you re-assign tasks along the way.
You can also add an estimate to a task which will show alongside the time remaining. This is HUGE for us. I wanted this feature so bad we considered switching to JIRA and tried out Axosoft, but those solved some problems and created new ones.
I always wanted to roll up hours by a Basecamp to-do item easily. But you can’t do this natively with Harvest. You can only roll up by [Harvest-defined] task, by person, or by project.
I would have to generate a report, export it to Excel, roll up/calculate the hours manually, and then hand-enter it into a Harvest invoice.
Now, with Everhour, I can run a report by the project for the last month, aggregated by task, and get rolled up hours (across all Basecamp members) for a particular task.
BONUS: You can arrange your report by Iteration and get a total for a Basecamp to-do list, which is also super-helpful.
Limitations and Workarounds
Everhour doesn’t have its invoicing function but does integrate with Xero and FreshBooks. I still use Harvest for actual invoicing, and it does have a nice feature for handling retainers which we use.
What apps do you use?
Have a favorite app you use for tasks or invoicing? Any weird workarounds? Share in the comments!