Harvest Release Notes

We’re always working to help our customers run their business more efficiently and make smarter decisions. This month, we’ve made updates to both Harvest and Forecast that focus on deeper insights, smoother navigation, and more flexibility in managing projects and people.

Here’s what’s new:

Task-Level Scheduling in Forecast

Project planning is only as strong as the details behind it. For many Forecast customers, assigning scheduled hours only at the assignment level doesn’t quite fit how teams actually work (or how budgets are structured).

Teams need more granular control over their team’s schedules. That’s why we’re excited to introduce task-level scheduling in Forecast, so you can have more clarity, control, and confidence in planning and delivering client work.

Now, instead of assigning time just at the project level, you can plan time against individual tasks. Easily break complex assignments into manageable steps, helping you gain better visibility into workload distribution, and improve forecasting accuracy—two things that are critical for teams juggling multiple deliverables.

Watch this quick demo guided by Joschka, one of our Senior Software Engineers, for a closer look at task-level scheduling in Forecast:

Deeper Profitability Insights

We’ve expanded our Profitability Report to give you a more granular view of your business. The team and task subpages now show the revenue, cost, and profit associated with each team and task. These insights help you identify what’s working (and what’s not, double down on high-performing work, and make smarter decisions so you can make confident, informed decisions to grow your bottom line.

Seamless Switching Between Harvest and Forecast

You can now move effortlessly between Harvest and Forecast with our new app switcher in the top navigation. No more juggling tabs or signing in twice. Just quick, convenient access to the tools you use every day. Plan your team’s time in Forecast, then track their progress in Harvest with just a few clicks.

Looking ahead

From sharper scheduling to deeper profitability insights and easier navigation between tools, these updates are all about helping professional services firms work smarter, not harder. Whether you’re planning projects, managing time, or analyzing performance, Harvest and Forecast are evolving to meet your needs—so you can stay focused on doing great work.

Ready to explore what’s new? Jump in and start putting these updates to work for your team today.

Harvest Premium

Different customers have different needs. That's why we're thrilled to launch Harvest Premium, a new plan we designed to help those customers who need to stay on top of profitability while maintaining an accurate record of time spent and project details. Plus, with Premium, you get expanded SSO options through SAML.

Watch our live demonstration of Premium, hosted by Harvest Product Manager, Sophia Hagger, Customer Success Manager, Maggie Harrison, and Senior Product Marketing Manager, Cameron Fitchett. They discuss how Premium can help you create create more visibility while optimizing for greater profitability.

If you’re interested in trying Premium, all current customers of Harvest have access through the month of April, 2025. And for more information about Premium, details about features, and support articles to guide your experience, head on over to the Harvest Help Center.

What’s New in Premium?

Premium is designed for businesses that need to stay on top of profitability while enhancing transparency and control over project workflows. Here’s what’s new:

• Profitability Reporting: Access reports that visualize revenue, costs, and profit margin - for your company, clients, projects, teams, and even tasks.

• Activity Log: Stay up-to-date with a clear audit trail of changes made to timesheets and projects. Track changes, catch mistakes, and drive accountability.

• SAML-based SSO: Manage user permissions more effectively, giving your team a simple, one-click login experience while keeping sensitive data secure.

• Require Notes: Ensure every time entry includes details about what work was completed, helping you better track project status and communicate progress.

Feature Spotlight: Profitability Reporting

“What kinds of clients are most profitable for us? How much money did we make on that project?”

We want to help you pinpoint the kinds of clients and projects that are most profitable. That way, you can have confidence in the projects you decide to prioritize while refining your business development strategy for maximum impact.

We’ve introduced Profitability reporting in Harvest Premium to help you answer these questions. With Profitability reporting, you can assess business performance over time and validate you’re hitting your target margins. You can also drill down into specific clients, projects, teams, and even tasks to determine what kind of work is making the most money for your business.

Our profitability report visualizes your revenue, costs, and total profits in a single view. It’s great for quickly determining company performance and identifying trends.

We also calculate profitability by client, project, team, and task. This not only helps you pinpoint your best-performing work, but also optimize project and task price points, identify productivity gaps, and set high-level benchmarks.

Available to account Owners and Administrators, you can find profitability reports in the “Reports” tab in the top navigation menu. You can find more detailed instructions for using Profitability reporting in our support article.

Feature Spotlight: Activity Log

The accuracy of your team’s timesheets is critical for creating a precise picture of time spent. Accurate timesheets also mean accurate invoices and reporting, ensuring you never have to make corrections after the fact or make decisions based on bad data.

Harvest Premium includes Activity Log, a detailed record of all time entries, changes, project updates, and approvals. Activity Log helps you stay informed with an audit trail of who changed what and when.

By reviewing your team’s Activity Log, you can spot unexpected changes or errors across time entries, projects, and approvals. Stay up to date on the latest activity so you have complete visibility into your team’s progress.

Feature Spotlight: SAML-based SSO

Along with Profitability Reporting and Activity Log, Premium includes expanded SAML-based SSO options. You can now log in to Harvest in one click through platforms like Microsoft Entra, Okta, JumpCloud, and Ping Identity.

Check out our FAQ to learn more.

Why Upgrade to Premium?

As your business grows, so does the need for better oversight and operational efficiency. Harvest Premium provides you with the clarity and control to make smarter decisions, reduce administrative burden, and drive greater profitability.

Explore Premium Today On Us

Harvest Premium is available now! To learn more, visit our Premium Plan page.

A simpler way to schedule

Scheduling your team isn’t as simple as it should be. The aim is to assign the right people for the job at hand, putting your team in the best position to deliver great work.
But knowing who is available to take on new work isn’t always obvious. It requires constant communication and meticulous schedule maintenance—otherwise, you risk scheduling conflicts and under- or over-utilizing your people.
Our customers have shared horror stories of the homemade spreadsheets they use to allocate their people’s time across projects. These documents are complex, highly manual, and provide no clear visual experience. It's no wonder that our customers commonly report devoting an entire person’s time and energy to managing them.
We wanted to create a way to schedule your team that is simple, visual, and transparent. With Forecast, you can easily click and drag assignments across a timeline and visualize your plans.

Our recent updates to Forecast allow you to plan at any scale. You can scenario plan across broader periods of time, check the monthly availability of your team, and use placeholders to determine when and where they’ll need to spend their time. This helps you make those critical business decisions regarding what projects your team can commit to, and who you may need to hire to take on more work.
"It’s exceptionally helpful for assessing overall company availability across disciplines for new business opportunities in the future, in one central place," said Dina Murphy, Director of Production at Area17. "The ability to color code new potential business vs. current project runnings vs. retainers has been exceptionally helpful when understanding what work people are booked to."
You can also quickly build project timelines by scheduling your team by week, and then optimize their hours by day for greater utilization.
With Forecast, the choice is yours.

Maximizing impact while balancing workloads

Once projects get underway, it can be easy to lose track of your team’s capacity.
It's a balancing act.
On the one hand, you want to maximize your team's time, ensuring each person has the amount of work necessary to push projects forward, stay ahead of deadlines, and ultimately get the assigned hours they need to get paid. But on the other hand, too much work can quickly burn your team out. Your team becomes overextended, causing deadlines to slip and quality to suffer.
To thread the needle, you need an easy way to visualize your team’s workload at any moment.
Forecast was designed to provide a clear view of your team’s availability and capacity. With a color-coded heat map, Forecast highlights who on your team is overbooked (in red) and who has hours remaining to schedule (in green). You can also see the exact number of hours a person is either under or overbooked, or their capacity percentage by week or by month.
These details not only let you know which schedules you need to adjust, but also the exact number of hours you have to assign or need to reallocate.
The good news is that Forecast takes the pain out of adjusting your team’s schedules. Simply click and drag to resize assignments. You can also split assignments to break up larger chunks of work into smaller, more maneuverable pieces, or edit assignments directly for more granular control.

Keep projects on track and on budget

The profitability of your company depends on your ability to meet deadlines and keep projects on budget. No project goes exactly to plan, and when things change, it’s critical that you are able to track what has changed and the impact that has on your budget.
Forecast was built to work in tandem with Harvest. By bringing together tracked time and scheduled time, you can predict budget spend, track your remaining budget as you schedule, and compare your team’s scheduled hours to the actual time they track.

A clear view of your project’s runway

Harvest reports on your project’s progress over time. In our project summary report, you can see the progress of your project in terms of hours spent, the amount of budget remaining, your internal costs, and your uninvoiced amount.
When integrated with Forecast, Harvest will pull your project’s scheduled hours from Forecast over to your project summary report. Now, you can see exactly when your project will reach its budget based on the hours you’ve assigned.
That way, you can stay on top of your project’s budget and make adjustments if you’re at risk of going over.

Schedule with confidence

It’s important to not overextend your team’s time. Using more hours than you have available is a quick way to deplete your budget. When Forecast is integrated with Harvest, any linked project with an hourly budget will display the remaining budgeted hours alongside your team’s future scheduled hours.
This helps you determine whether you’re at risk of going over budget, or conversely, whether you have more hours available to assign so you can give those critical tasks the time they deserve.

Track progress against your plan

Forecast and Harvest work together to visualize your team’s scheduled hours vs their actual tracked time. You can see this in your project’s hours per week graph to get a high-level view of how your team has progressed against the original plan.
Use this graph to spot trends at a glance, identifying when your team has worked the expected amount of time and when they haven’t.
When things haven’t gone to plan and you need to investigate further, you can drill down into each person’s estimated vs actual hours tracked.
Who has worked more hours than expected? Who has worked less?
Seeing the estimated hours your team was assigned to work next to their actual, tracked time, allows you to identify discrepancies that might warrant a closer look. It’s possible that someone on your team was out, causing a decrease in the hours dedicated to a specific project.
It could also suggest that the project assigned didn’t require as many hours as you initially scheduled. If you see this trend manifest over time, then you’ll be able to create more accurate estimates in the future based on the actual time specific tasks take.

Try Forecast for free today

Are you ready to try a better way of planning your team’s time? Start a 30-day free trial of Forecast today and get access to easy scheduling, visualized capacity, and budget insights - all in one simple, easy-to-use tool.

Quickly access timers and seamlessly sync across all devices with the new mobile widgets in Harvest

The key to ensuring a successful time tracking process is to make it as easy as possible for your team to integrate it into their workday — and Harvest is an intuitive solution that does just that.

We’re constantly working on ways to make time tracking easier for you and your team — which is why we’re excited to announce our new feature: a mobile widget for iOS. Thanks to this update, you and your team can now seamlessly access timers without having to open the Harvest mobile app.

Read below for more details on what you can do with mobile widgets and how they make it even easier to track time without interrupting your workflow.

Quickly access timers

In order for time tracking to provide the most benefit, you need to be able to do it quickly and conveniently. And while this has always been possible with Harvest, our new mobile widgets make it even easier.

The new mobile widgets not only allow you to view the status of your running timers, but also to start a new timer or start an existing one on the go. Now you can save time by skipping the login process or opening the app — all you have to do is click start or stop before getting back to doing your best work.

Seamlessly sync across all devices

The best part about the new Harvest mobile widgets is that they’re seamlessly connected with the main application — meaning you can easily access any created timer via your mobile widget, desktop application, or mobile app.

This way you don’t have to worry about losing any tracked time or created timers when you use the mobile widget.

How to get started

Here’s how to enable the Harvest widget from your mobile Home Screen:

• Touch and hold an empty area on your Home Screen until the apps wiggle.
• Tap the “+” button in the upper-left corner.
• Search for Harvest and click “Add Widget.”
• Select a Widget size and tap “Done.” (Note: the amount of time entry information you can see from the Home Screen is dependent on the Widget’s size)

We’re confident that the new mobile widget will boost your time tracking process by ensuring the most seamless experience possible. If you have any questions on how to get started using this exciting new feature, our support team is always happy to help!

As you likely know, getting paid for your hard work is critical to the success of your business. With Harvest, it’s not only easy for you to create accurate invoices, but also send them to your clients and receive compensation quickly.

Now, we’ve made the invoicing process easier, faster, and more flexible than ever.

Over the last few months, we’ve worked on updates that give you the ability to quickly add multiple recipients to invoice emails, share invoice links in the way that works best for you, and even test them out before sending to ensure the best client experience possible.

Read below for more details on how the update enhances your invoicing process and helps you work how you want to work.

Easily add multiple recipients

While you’ve always had the capability of sending invoice emails to multiple recipients through Harvest, the update eliminates the need to exit the invoicing experience and add new contacts before completing the send.

Now, you can quickly and easily add multiple recipients with the click of a button without having to create a new contact. You can even CC important stakeholders to notify them of the new invoice.

Additionally, when you send invoice emails to multiple recipients, they’re now bundled — meaning all recipients and stakeholders will receive the same email and be included in one point of communication.

Send invoices with confidence

With Harvest you can rest assured your invoices are accurate — and now you have the ability to ensure your emails are as accurate as possible.

Our update allows you to preview invoice emails before sending them out so you can make sure they look exactly how you want. You can even send yourself a test email before completing the send so you can ensure you’re providing the best client experience possible.

And as a reminder, Harvest’s integrations with PayPal and Stripe also make it easy for your customers to submit safe, secure payments with one, hassle-free click — allowing you to get paid quickly.

Share invoices on your own terms

Do you prefer to send invoices outside of Harvest? We’re making it easier to do just that. With this update, you’re now able to easily access invoice links that you can add to outside emails, send over Slack, or share in any way that works best for you.

And the best part is these links still allow you to receive payment online — making your billing process more flexible than ever.

To access your shareable link, all you have to do is click on the “copy invoice link” button next to the send button on the invoice page, and you’re ready to send however you want. Additionally, PDFs of online payment-enabled invoices will now have a “pay online” link near amount due.

We’re confident that these invoicing updates will boost your business operations by ensuring the best experience possible. If you have any questions on how to get started using these features, our support team is always happy to help!