After months of hard work, we are thrilled to finally unveil the new Harvest Timesheet.

This new timesheet is a giant step forward from the previous version. The interface is redesigned from the ground up. We sweated over every pixel and interaction, down to the timer animation on the “Stop” button. The codebase has been rewritten from scratch, and the new timesheet now has a stronger and more reliable engine that will serve us well for years to come. We think you’re going to be pleased with the resulting product – a faster, simpler, smoother, and more powerful new Harvest Timesheet.

 

 

Chosen – Fast Project and Task Selection

Historically, the slowest part of tracking time in Harvest has been the process of finding the right project and task. By applying our homegrown Chosen plugin to the new timesheet, instead of scrolling through the dropdown menu to find your project or task, you can search quickly through the lists.

Week Navigation on Day View

Our research led us to realize that many folks using the day view would switch back and forth between days – to review or reference their previous entries. That process will be faster and easier with the new week navigation on the day view:

Switching between days in the week is instantaneous (you need to try this to believe it). The new week navigation is also a handy way to see your entire week’s progress at a glance.

Better Timestamps Support

Some customers prefer to track time with start and end times (versus with just the duration). We have tweaked the timesheet interface to better support that method. There is an extra column of start and end times, and all time entries are sorted chronologically, so you can see the day visually displayed as if it were a calendar.

For those who want to try out tracking time by timestamps, you can change your mode under Account Settings > Edit Preferences. It’s an account-wide setting (if you change it, everyone in the account will see the new setting).

Live Timesheet

The previous timesheet became “stale” if you left it open in your browser without refreshing. The new timesheet (both day and week view) is live – it refreshes itself every few seconds. This is especially useful for many customers who use our latest add-ons, such as the Mac App, the iPhone App, or the recent integration with Basecamp. Any updates you make outside of Harvest will automatically show up on your timesheet; there will be no need for you to refresh the page.

New Technology

Under the shiny new interface is a new, powerful and robust codebase. For us, as a web technology company, this is exciting stuff. The new technology made it possible to create a much faster and smoother experience, and our new code will make future improvements easier. We hope to share some of the nerdy details in the near future.

Credit goes to the Timesheet 2012 Team: Dee Zsombor, Matthew Lettini, Patrick Filler, Barry Hess, Ken Earley and Joschka Kintscher. Also to our designers Samara Stauss and Kim Ku for helping with user research and early interface prototypes. Lastly but not least, a big thank you to our beta testers for their valuable feedback!

We believe the new timesheet offers you a much faster and smoother experience, and we hope you enjoy it! As always, thank you for your continued support, and let us know if you have any questions or feedback.