Harvest App Reviews

Never had much of a problem with this app, until the last update. Now when I sleep my macbook, then open it later, when Harvest alerts me Ive been idle and I elect to remove the idle time, somehow Harvest decides to add several hours. This latest occurence at idle time, I was at around 5 hours for the day… and suddenly now Im at 9.5… neat!

This is a review of the app, and not the service. So far, so good with Harvest, the service. This app, however, needs some attention. It’s incredibly laggy, entering into fields (Retina MBP, high speed connection) results in frequent beach balling; pinging the server, obviously. That would almost be forgivable, if it weren’t that the app constantly crashes. Sticking with the iPhone app, until the desktop client has gotten some much needed attention.

If I were tasked with desiging a UI to confound users, it’s hard to imagine I could do a better job than Harvest. Perhaps it’s OK on the desktop, but laptop support is abyssmal. As an example, if you leave a timer running and open your laptop when it has no internet connection, you’ll be prompted to either remove the idle time or continue, despite the fact that the client can’t do either of those things for you. Either save my selection and sync the event when I’m connected, or don’t prompt me. Additionally, you can’t manually start or stop a timer when you’re offline, because the server is the only system of record. Even worse, today I was prompted to remove idle time or continue timing. I selected remove idle time, and a minute later the app corrected me, telling me it was idle or something, and reversed my change. At that point, I didn’t recall how much time it was idle for, so I couldn’t even correct it accurately. Other services like FreshBooks handle offline updates seamlessly. There’s really no excuse for how bad the experience of using Harvest on a laptop is.

This review is just to request one simple feature added to the app: when selecting a project, please add the ability to autocomplete by client name rather than simply the project. The website does this and it’s super useful. When you have many clients and you repeat project descriptions across client (i.e. “Design Phase”) it’s annoying to have to scroll through all the clients to find the correct project to bill.

I’m not sure how this got into the app store. On first launch you MUST enter login credentials. You don’t have the option of cancelling or quitting. I had to force-quit the app.

Hi folks! Nice job, thx for the app. It’s much more convenient than extension for chrome. Meanwhile, would you consider adding a notifications for it? It would be really cool to have a reminder to make a pause in my job (I prefer to work by fixed block of time).

I’ve been having to log in every time the app or my computer restarts lately. It sometimes doesn’t show a project as an option (even though it exists on the web app). Currently it’s showing the same project 10 times in the project chooser. Sometimes the button to select a project from the list doesn’t work.

For a timer application, it’s remarkable the Harvest app has so many problems. For some reason the app duplicates customer entries, so if I select a project to bill, it shows the billing line items many times. The resolution from harvest for this and other bugs is to reset the app by holding option and clicking on the help button. I end up needing to do this once a week or so. As an objective-c developer myself, it’s hard to fathom how this app can be so poorly implemented.

The app constantly logs me out. Harvest Support tells me it a known issue with no time frame for a fix. I can see that the app hasen’t been updated in the last 8 months. That is far to long for such an annoying bug to remain. The entire point of the service is to make tracking time so easy you are never in a position of having to go back and figure out when you worked; being unable to start new timers consistantly frequently puts me in the position of trying to remember when I started work on a project. I spend far to much of my time fiddling with the Harvest app and far too little actually working for my clients. Additionally, the ‘remove idle time’ feature is incredibly porly implemented. The two choices displayed in the pop up don’t make sense in context most of the time. If you’ve stopped a timer on the iPhone or web app, the pop up remains and you have to dismiss it by clicking either ‘keep timing’ or ‘remove idle time’ but both buttons do the same thing if the time was stopped elsewhere. When starting new timers the UI is inconsistent. Sometimes start time and stop time boxes will be displayed and sometimes a single ‘duration box will be displayed. There does not appear to be a rhyme or reason to decide which to show. Full keyboard input is also very porly implimented which makes accesssibility a problem. When hitting tab to advance to the next field, the order of the fields is not left to right, top to bottom. Additionallty there is no way to access the end time box via the tab key. For users who like to use full keyboard access or for whom this feature is a requiered accessibility tool, the app is imposible to use. Once these farily obvious bugs are fixed the app will be workable. It would be nice to be able to change billable status, see your dashboard, send invoice and other options within the app eventually, but currently the app is not even feature complete to simply enter time, so I’m happy to access the other options on the website while you try to figure out the bugs. Please update your app more frequently that once every 8 months and at least fix obvious bugs like the log out issue as soon as they are discovered.

All I can seem to do with this app right now is start and stop the timer for a timer created via ahte web interface form the menu bar. It seems anything else crashes the app.

I was so surprised to see all the negative reviews here. I have had zero problems with the app and very much enjoy the use of Harvest on my computer, iPad, and iPhone. I have found the integration seamless between all devices and the website. I also use the website to track expenses and invoice clients. A note - I disabled the ‘detect idle time’ option in preferences because my work can easily take me off the computer but should still be tracked. It seems others have had issues with it - perhaps they didn’t know they could easily disable it! All in all, very useful, and glitch-free in my experience!

It is very confusing everytime I look up at the menu bar icon and see a decimal representation of the timer. I would much prefer a HOURS:MINUTES format… or at least the choice between the two.

The Harvest software/service lacks the most basic feature to convert an estimate into an active job. That means you have to re-enter all the information that’s already been entered into the estimate into a new job screen. So there’s a definate chance for error anytime you have to re-enter information. Isn’t this what software like this is supposed to solve? Seems like a minor annoyance? I’ve been using Harvest for over a year and this is finally wearing on me. Might be time to look at another solution unless they happen to fix this. I just don’t understand how they overlooked this?

The app works great for tracking time. It used to work flawlesly on my computer until the last few updates for Mac came out (Running Yosemite now). Now when I pull up the app it shows the same job 4 or 5 times. The time tracking still works, but the jobs are just showing several times. REsolve that issue and I have no problem with the app.

I use this app every day, and it never fails. I wish I could search by client name instead of just job name, but that’s not really a big deal. I love Harvest, it’s one of those services that I’ve grown my business with and I hope they keep making this better.

Harvest app could be great if the following items were fixed: - App should have a user preference of whether to show decimal time or actualy time format; this should not be a company wide preference but an app preference. - App loses company and login infomation all the time. - You can go back a day and edit time entries on the website, you should be able to do it in the app too. App disables editing for past days entries.

If it werent for the fact that I have to re-login to the App at least once a week I would definitely give this App a decent rating. It used to be fairly competent at managing idle time on my Mac, so when I went for lunch and forgot to turn off the timer it would always prompt me if I wanted to remove said time or continue the timer. Not so anymore, I’m almost lucky to see that banner.

This app frequently forgets my login credentials. When it does so, it shows a login box (name, password AND URL - can’t you look up my URL from my account?). There is no way to dismiss the box without loggin in or force-quit. If you are about to choose Harvest as your invoicing system because of the convenient apps for timesheet entry (like I did) I’d suggest you look elsewhere.

I’m 100% sure the Harvest team doesn’t maintain this anymore. The constant logging out is the most annoying part.

It seems like the people are Harvest have forsaken their Mac application; as of writing this (Jan 2015) the app haven’t been updated in over a year. No retina support, login credentials frequently need to be reentered, and a minimal feature set. Such a shame since I enjoy their core product.