Harpoon is a web-hosted accounting and finance app that helps freelancers and consultants set and meet their financial goals. In addition, Harpoon provides useful tools to help users collect revenue and manage finances. Features include time tracking, invoicing, expense tracking, project scheduling and more. The vendor’s value proposition is that their solution that helps users boost their freelancing career.
$19
per month
Harvest
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Harvest is used to track time, gain insights from past projects, and get paid for work. Dedicated apps and integrations with popular tools like Asana and Slack allow Harvest to fit into a team’s workflow.
A selection of visual reports are offered to keep projects running smoothly and an organization's team supported. Harvest also helps to turn a team’s tracked time and expenses into professional nvoices and collect payment quickly with integrated online payments.
$13.75
per month per seat
Pricing
Harpoon
Harvest
Editions & Modules
Single User - Unlimited Everything
$19
per month
Harvest Pro
$13.75
per month per seat
Harvest Premium
$17.50
per month per seat
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Harpoon
Harvest
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
20% discount for annual billing on Pro and Premium plans.
If you're freelancing or running a small marketing agency, I'll steer you strongly towards Harpoon. It's such a terrific fit for this business type. It provides easy invoice management so if that's all you care about, use Harpoon this way. If you want a tool that will guide you towards success, Harpoon helps you do this when launching your account. Know what you want to earn, what it takes to get there, and how you're doing along the way. What financial software for freelancers provides simple project tools? Harpoon.
Harvest is ideally suited for a variety of scenarios, particularly in the realms of freelance or consulting work, where accurate hour tracking for billing is crucial. It excels in small to medium businesses managing team projects, allowing for effective resource allocation and time management across multiple concurrent projects. For budgeting and forecasting, Harvest provides valuable data, aiding in accurately estimating the duration and cost of future projects based on past data. It's also highly beneficial for remote or distributed teams, thanks to its cloud-based platform that facilitates seamless coordination. Additionally, its detailed reporting features enhance client transparency, fostering trust through clear communication of time spent on projects. However, Harvest may be less suitable for larger enterprises with complex integration needs or specialized industries requiring more niche features. Small startups or individuals on tight budgets might find the cost challenging, especially if they don't fully utilize all its features. Lastly, for those needing only basic time tracking, simpler or free tools might be more appropriate, making Harvest an unnecessary expenditure for basic needs.
Consistently making updates to better serve their wide variety of users
Allows for a decent amount of customization - you can put in different tasks for different departments, you can put in project costs on a one-time or recurring basis to compare time to money, etc.
It's pretty easy to pull customizable reports to fit what data you want to look at.
Sometimes expense reporting bring up duplicate transactions, which may be more of a fault of the API that connects my account, which is Plaid
Would be nice if in the future, they can offer ACH as one of the payment options for invoices
There are some redundancies that pop up when setting time frames for client work and the projects attached to them. If they aren't aligned, it can cause inaccurate reporting. If it just sent it once and it took care of both functions, it would be easier
We would love to see Harvest build a feature for more detailed proposals that could be signed by the client and then automatically be turned into a billable invoice. The estimate falls short of this for larger projects.
Sending an invoice directly to the client from the Harvest dashboard can sometimes fail. Because it's coming from a spoofed email- some clients never get the invoice because it get's trapped in their spam folder.
Again, just a minor compatibility issues using with other platforms such as Basecamp, but it does do everything promised. The only downfall we have found is having to create a job in both platforms and then connecting them later vs being able to create a project once and having them automatically connect.
The few times I've needed help or had questions about the platform, the founder got back to me. And fairly fast. The extra effort resonated well with me
I have not actually had any customer support issues as the product just works for me and I have not needed it. So using that as the basis of making my assessment on support I would reckon the team are pretty responsive and attentive to customer needs. I have only used the solution on Chrome and Android so have no idea what the experience is like on other browsers or phone operating systems.
These others accounting/invoicing platforms did a great job with the invoicing and bookkeeping, but at the time I used them, none of them had any goalsetting features. I also found the metrics dashboards a bit underwhelming.
Everhour is just very rudimentary and ugly. It did the okay for time tracking and basic reports — but it wasn’t very intuitive and could’ve been a lot more elegant. You couldn’t edit other users time or make corrections it was just a data pull and that was it.
Open air is even worse. it’s like something out of 1985. Extremely ugly and not at all easy to use. It fulfilled the basic requirement of tracking time and we did not use it for anything else. When they raised the price to eight grand a year, despite our limited use of it’s functionality. We quickly dropped them.
By providing a nice all-in-one platform for managing clients, related projects, invoicing and bookkeeping, it saved me from having to work with multiple platforms.
Saved me from wasting any further time trying to research competitors and trying out other software
Better tracking of time for projects = better quotes for clients! In turn, they trust us more, because we're only billing for the time used and projects completed.
We can also have clear conversations with employees about productivity and provide feedback with real numbers that the employee has control over.
