Harvest is a time-tracking tool which allows us to see how much time is spent on a project. It gives us a valuable insight in our business. Keeping track of the hours ensures we stay on schedule and within budget. It also makes sure our future project estimates are more accurate and if needed provides great reference for clients.

In this screenshot you see an example of one of our smaller projects. It shows we came up 10 hours short and exceeded the original estimate by 21%. It also shows that there’s no way you can design, even a small website, in less than 16 hours. Not a very good estimate. ;) Lesson learned.

We were pretty much spot on with front-end development. Which in my opinion is a difficult one to get right considering the design choices and different browsers. The task ‘Content Management Systeem’ represents the implementation and tweaking of WordPress.

Most of the time we work on a project basis. This means we give out an estimate of how many hours are needed on the different parts of the project (interaction design, design itself.) and it’s our responsibility to deliver within budget. Keeping track of the hours spent in Harvest helps against kitchen sink syndrome. It forces you to be realistic.

You can use Harvest in your browser, as a desktop widget or on your iPhone. What’s cool is when you accidentally leave the timer on while you’re away. Harvest recognizes you aren’t doing anything. When you return, Harvest asks you if you want to keep the idle time or remove it. Happens to me all the time.

If you’ve put together your own time tracking app you can use the Harvest API to handle the difficult parts. It already supports a lot of services like Basecamp, Google Apps and WordPress.

We’d love to hear your experience!