App Awareness Month – Harvest

This post is part of App Awareness, our month-long series where we spotlight a different Google Apps Marketplace application every day in April. Everyone’s favorite holiday – Tax Day – is this week, so we’re focusing on applications that make reporting and accounting easier. The applications we chose to highlight demonstrate excellent integration with Google Apps, and we either use and love the product or know a lot of other people who do. Have a favorite Marketplace app of your own? Tweet it to @bettercloud.

Harvest – Because Time Tracking Should Be Easy

Harvest provides an almost fool-proof method to time tracking. Useful for outside contractors and consultants, as well as part-time or hourly employees, Harvest allows you to easily fill out, track and submit hours by day or week. And you can even start and stop timers throughout the day for even easier tracking. Once hours are submitted, admins can generate reports and create invoices, which can be used to bill clients or an employer.

One of the most common reasons time worked is reported incorrectly is simply because workers forget to fill out timesheets. This problem is alleviated with Harvest, which automatically sends users, who have not filled out their hours, an email. This email includes the same time recording device available in the full application. Users can fill out and report their hours from directly within the email, eliminating misreported hours and resulting under or over payment for time worked.

Google Apps Integration

In addition to the email notifications and in-mail time sheets, Harvest allows admins to export time reports directly to Google Spreadsheets, which provides for easier viewing, sharing and collaboration. You can then easily, if you wish, build charts and graphs using your time tracking data in Google Spreadsheets.

Why We Like It

We use Harvest as an easy way to track time on internal projects. It’s not only an easier way for us to manage costs and reporting, but our employees love it as well! Since we base our business on everything Google Apps, it only makes sense to use an integrated application for time tracking. Employees can access and launch Harvest from directly within their inbox as with any other integrated third-party application. We’ve also heard from our team that the automated reminders and ability to track time anywhere (Gmail, iPhone and Android) are added benefits. We’re all for accurate reporting and Harvest makes that possible!

Domain administrators can install Harvest via the Google Apps Marketplace. Harvest offers a free 30 day trial to test out the product, and paid plans are on a per month per user basis and differ based on the number of users accessing the app.

Stay tuned for more of our favorite Apps in the Google Apps Marketplace!

Can you guess tomorrow’s app?
Hint: This app makes your site instantly interactive!

About App Awareness Month

At BetterCloud, we’ve seen first hand the impact Google Apps can have on a business: extreme cost cutting, streamlined management processes, enhanced collaboration and mobility and much more.

During our time as an independent software provider focused 100% on the Google Apps platform, we’ve interacted with thousands of organizations using Google Apps and we’ve discovered one common trend: knowledge and awareness of third-party applications that extend and enhance Google Apps is extremely limited.

This April, we’re devoting the BetterCloud blog to educating Google Apps users on the wide array of applications available for Google Apps today. These products not only enhance native Google Apps functionalities, but bring a diverse range of services from CRM, to expense management, process and systems management and more to your Google Apps environment. More importantly, adding these applications to Google Apps allows you to retire expensive legacy software licenses and creates a more cohesive organization.

Disclaimer: The companies appearing in this month-long series have not been contacted nor consulted regarding their inclusion. Our choices are based solely on reader suggestions and our experiences with the applications.