Harvest has been in business for eleven years. We started as a team of four, and today we have a team of fifty wonderful, smart, kind, and humble people. Our products serve over 50,000 businesses from around the world (that’s not a hyperbole–we really have customers from over a hundred countries!), and we’ve had the good fortune to be profitable and sustainable from the beginning. Best of all, we’ve never taken any investment, so we have no one to answer to but ourselves and can take this business wherever we wish.

By most standards, things are great at Harvest. But we do have one glaring problem.

When we look at our team, we find only men in our top leadership positions. We see twenty-seven people on the product team and just two women. And there isn’t just a disparity in gender–there’s also a racial disparity.

As co-founders of Harvest, this is troubling for Danny and me, especially because we’re usually considered to represent “diversity” in this country (Danny and I are Asian American). We’ve faced racism and exclusion throughout our lives, and we care deeply about social justice, diversity, and equality. Yet, somehow, we forgot about diversity at our own business.

Our excuse was that this wasn’t intentional: we didn’t set out to hire only dudes for our product team, and we didn’t mean for most of our women employees to be on the customer service team.

But that’s an excuse. And excuses are part of the problem.

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A few weeks ago, we announced a forthcoming feature: roles. Today, we’re beginning to roll out this new feature, so you should see it in your account within the next few days! That means you’ll be just a few clicks away from reports that can answer questions like:

• Do I need to hire another person to help my design team?
• Did my remote team track time this week?
• Which team is most billable, most overworked, or consistently under capacity?

What’s a Role?

Roles are descriptors for your teammates, which let you associate a person with their responsibility or position at your company. You can create any role to help identify your teammates—like Designer, Sales, Manager, NYC Office, etc. And you’ll be able to apply any role to anyone on your team.

The Power of Roles

Don’t let the simple setup of roles fool you. A role’s real power is in your Team report.

In the past, your Team Overview was just a list of everyone on your team. If you work with more than a handful of people, that list was unwieldy. What if you just wanted to report on a specific group?

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We were excited to kick off the summer with the release of our new Fixed Fee feature. But one problem’s been bugging us all summer long. After you set up your fixed fee project, how do you know if it’s on track, or if you charged enough?

Answering those questions isn’t easy. Your fixed fee project might be wildly profitable or leaking thousands of dollars. Maybe your team’s working too much (and potentially out of scope), or working too little (and in danger of missing milestones). There simply isn’t a straightforward way to know this info in Harvest.

Today that’s changing! We just released budgets for fixed fee projects, so you can keep things on track.

Now if you create or edit any fixed fee project, you’ll see two ways to budget: in fees or in hours. And depending on which budget method you choose, Harvest will surface different kinds of useful info.

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Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of a new version of the Harvest API!

Our API has a long history. It was first introduced in November 2006, with a limited set of time tracking functionality. A year later, we added support for managing clients, projects, tasks, and users. In 2009, invoicing and expenses made their API debut. But the last major update to the Harvest API was made in October 2011.

The new version we’re releasing today is faster, more consistent, and more complete than our existing API (v1), and gives us a solid foundation to expose even more functionality in the future.

What’s New in API v2?

API v2 is a JSON API that allows you to interact with your Harvest account programmatically. You can track time, log expenses, create projects, and more.

Security: Authentication is even more secure. Starting with API v2, we’re replacing Basic Authentication with Personal Access Tokens via Harvest ID. To get one, sign in to your Harvest ID account and click on the Developers link in the top navigation. From there, you can create a new personal access token to authenticate yourself! You can add or destroy these as needed, so you have finer control over your tokens.

Pagination: All collection responses will be paginated so that they’re faster to generate and deliver. You’ll have the freedom to choose how many items you’d like to receive per page. We also include links to the first, last, previous, and next page.

Consistency: Consistency was a major goal for this version. We now return more appropriate HTTP response codes and use consistently coded timezone and currency codes.

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It’s our belief that time tracking should be frictionless and accessible, no matter where you prefer to work. That’s why we offer desktop and mobile apps, browser extensions, and integrations with your favorite tools, including Trello, Basecamp, Asana, and Github. Until now, however, there’s been one glaring exception: Slack.

If you’re like many modern businesses, chances are you spend a lot of your working day in Slack, discussing projects, sharing updates, asking questions, and posting that Bitmoji that perfectly captures your feelings. Now you can add tracking time to that list.

With the launch of Harvest for Slack, you can bring time tracking directly into your team’s conversation. The integration also puts a ton of new information at your fingertips with the magic of slash commands. Try out the new Slack integration for yourself or read on for a rundown of everything you can do with it:

Conversations move fast. It’s easy to start chatting about a project without getting a chance to start a timer. Now all you have to do is type /harvest start into Slack and you’ll be able to start a Harvest timer without leaving the conversation. And when you’re done, just type /harvest stop to stop tracking. Continue reading…

From their provocative documentaries to their incisive reporting, VICE has been a force in the media since it first exploded into popularity at the turn of the millennia. The company now represents the success of a veritable media empire, with everything from news shows to meal kits appearing in recent years.

But one part of the VICE family that you’re probably less familiar with is Virtue, the creative agency by VICE. They’ve crafted campaigns for everyone from Lululemon to Mercedes-Benz. We were given special insight to this well-oiled machine from Mischa van Lomm, Senior Project Manager at VICE Media in Germany.

Mischa and teammates at VICE Virtue

He answered our biggest question: how do they do it? How do they execute with their signature high quality every single time — even for true industry challenges, like a client that requests a range of social assets be produced in under a month, or making a client’s wishes come true and not going over budget?

They manage their projects meticulously. From planning who is working on what for each day of every week to doing full post-mortems on large projects, Virtue maps out what exactly should happen at every step of the way using Harvest and Forecast.

The level of granular, transparent planning they can do with software outpaces any manual system, and is the key to success in the fast, hectic world of advertising.

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Figuring out who will work on what project is the tough recurring question all managers face. Today, scheduling time to a project in Forecast requires that you also assign that time to a person on your team. For the most part, this is naturally how scheduling works (“So-and-so is planned to work X hours next week on Project Y”).

However, this requirement can sometimes become a hassle. What if you have hours to assign to an upcoming project, but you’re not yet sure who’ll be working on it? What if everyone on your team is already at full capacity that week? What if you planned to hire someone to work those hours, but you haven’t hired them yet?

These are common real-life scenarios we’ve heard from our customers. As a workaround, our customers have been adding “dummy users” to their team in Forecast. Then they assign those dummy users to projects.

The main problem with this: Forecast charges for each person on your team! We don’t believe we should be charging you extra for a workaround.

Introducing Placeholders

Today, we’re excited to introduce Placeholders to Forecast.

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Have you ever gone to your Team section and asked yourself, “How do I get this report to show me just the people I’m most interested in?” Maybe you want to know how billable your designers are, what your developers are working on, or which team might be overworked.

Good question, and good news. We’re working on a feature that’ll allow you to get answers quickly, and it’s called Roles.

Roles are descriptors for your teammates, and allow you to specify what role each person plays in your company: Designer, Manager, Copywriter, etc. When we launch in a few weeks, we’ll share more details about how we envision these roles being used.

Today, however, we want to tell you about some important changes we’re making to support roles, so you know what to expect.

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We recently released a new Reports section in our mobile apps, which includes a basic Time Report for all users and a Team Report for Admin users. I’d like to give you a quick explanation of these two reports, plus another small enhancement that comes with these recent updates.

The My Time Report gives you a high level overview of how much time you’re tracking as an individual. It shows where you’re spending your time, whether it’s billable or non-billable, and how much you’ll be able to invoice for that time. This report is similar to the My Time Report in the Harvest web application, only it’s been designed with the mobile user in mind. Important figures stand out, and we took care to make any tabular information fit well on smaller screens. For now, we allow you to choose between five preset timeframes for this report. You can quickly navigate between timeframe periods by swiping left or right on iPhone or using the arrow buttons on Android. In the future, we hope to allow custom timeframes for this report.

The Team Report is based on the new Team section, released late last year. This report will give Administrators an overview of total time spent per week, along with time spent by each individual on their team that week. Similar to the My Time Report, you can easily navigate forward and backward through weeks using the arrow buttons (Android) or by swiping left and right (iPhone).

In addition to the new reports, we’ve also done some work on the backend to make sure the Favorites that you assign are persisted across all three of our apps: iPhone, Android, and Mac! If you track time from several different devices or switch accounts often, you don’t have to worry about that Favorites list disappearing or looking different when you sign in from somewhere new.

Team Tags in Forecast have always been a powerful way to organize your team when scheduling. If you want to see which of your developers has availability next month for a new project, you can simply filter your Team Schedule to just people tagged “Developer”.

Today, we’re shipping a small change that renames Team Tags to Roles. Roles work exactly like Team Tags did yesterday, so you might not even notice!

However, we did take this opportunity to also include a Roles manage page (which you can access from the navigation menu in the top left of Forecast). This page simply lists all roles you’ve created, and allows you to add, remove, or rename any role. You can also add or remove people from any role right from here.

Lastly, if you sync your Forecast account with a Harvest account, we have some news for you: we’re actively working to bring roles to Harvest! Stay tuned for more information on that soon.

If you haven’t used team tags before, we encourage you to try assigning roles to your team and filtering your Team Schedule! It’s a handy way to make scheduling more manageable. As always, if you have any questions, please drop us a line.