Harvest
My work with Studio Hyperset has me on the road quite a bit. And while I love my desktop accounting software, it’s inconvenient to invoice and track hours when I’m away from the office. In the past, I’d keep a spreadsheet record of billable hours and expenses and manually enter this information when I returned home. Occasionally, I was able to establish a working VNC with my desktop machine and generate invoices and log hours and expenses remotely, but, for whatever reason, my connections were infrequent and all-too-often interrupted. (This was doubly true internationally and when using cellular networks.)
While it hasn’t replaced my core accounting software, and I don’t anticipate it doing so anytime soon, I’ve recently begun using Harvest as a sort of ancillary, proxy timesheet system. I can bill, review, and manage time on all my devices — whichever’s closest during the madness of an on-site project or shoot — and import this data into my accounting software as it’s convenient. While I usually don’t, account holders can even use Harvest to bill clients at the end of the month and intivte them to settle invoices using a number of popular payment gateways.
As might be expected, Harvest offers prospective users a free 30-day trial. But at $12 a month for a single user — or $10.80 when one buys a year’s service up-front — it isn’t prohibitively expensive, and I’m certainly able to gain at least $0.35 worth of efficiency a day by using it. Moreover, as SH continues growing, I can upgrade to one of Harvest’s multi-user plans and thereby position SH to track and mange billable W9 and W2 time more accurately and easily than I could have in the past.