Posted on

TIL you shouldn’t share the “web invoice” link in Harvest

Harvest is amazing (genuinely). In two years as a daily active user, this is the first issue I’ve ever encountered with it:

I heard back from our developers, and it looks like this issues stems from not sending invoices directly from Harvest. It sounds like you might be copying the web invoice link and sending that to your clients, then marking the invoices as sent manually.

The problem with this, is our Stripe integration relies on a Sent invoice to generate an email address to be used for payment. This is compounded by the fact that we have per-user invoice links now. The invoice link you’re copying is from your own account, and when someone else visits that link, Harvest think it’s your email address viewing it.

To fix this, you’ll simply need to send your invoices directly from Harvest normally. If that’s not the case, let me know and we can take a closer look!

So, if you use Harvest, I guess you shouldn’t do that.

Posted on

Feedback for Harvest’s Forecast

I love, love, love Harvest. As a solo shop, Harvest is a $12/month investment which feels like a $400/month return.

One workflow aspect I’d love Harvest to solve for me is time forecasting. Here’s how I currently keep track of my commitments in iCal:

2016-02-09 at 7.46 AM

These details are a pain to keep updated, and rarely accurate. I’d love for Harvest to feed this data into my calendar automatically — project name, allocated hours for the week, actual hours to date.

Fortunately, Harvest has a secondary application called Forecast for team scheduling. Unfortunately, I ran into a couple of annoyances that will probably turn out to be blockers:

  • Forecast doesn’t automatically integrate with Harvest, where I’ve already identified my projects (and time budgets associated with each).
  • Given I jump between projects a bit, I’d like to be able to budget my time on a weekly basis instead of an hourly basis (e.g. 8 hours/week for a given project).

I can understand the appeal of producing Forecast as a separate product, but I really think Forecasting makes most sense as a feature of Harvest.

I’ve submitted this feedback to Harvest via support ticket, but thought it would be fun to blog too!