At approximately 4:50am EDT this morning, we encountered a brief service interruption due to a hardware update that was being made at our datacenter.  We were caught off-guard by this update and it resulted in approximately 20 minutes of unplanned downtime.  For those customers that were affected, we are sincerely sorry for the inconvenience. Please rest assured that no data was lost during this interruption.  We’ve updated our process with our datacenter and hosting provider to ensure these updates will not be a problem again in the future.

Beyond patching up the process, we decided it was important to create another formal channel of communication to our customers in an event of service interruption.  This means if any part of the Harvest service encounters trouble, we’ll let you know what we know and keep you posted.  With that in mind, we’ve just launched status.getharvest.com.  This site is hosted at a different datacenter, so it will never affected by events occuring at our main Harvest datacenter.  Add status.getharvest.com to your bookmarks and follow @harvest on Twitter for future real-time service status updates.  Thanks for your understanding and continued support.

After you register for the program (it’s quick!), we’ll provide you with a unique link to Harvest and promotional tools (such as banners) to help you refer people from your site or email and earn rewards. We provide a real-time dashboard so you know how many people you’ve sent our way and how your referrals are converting to customers.

Referring users to Harvest is as easy as sending a link such as http://www.getharvest.com/?r=yourname. We note that the visitor came from you and if that visitor converts to a trial and subsequently a paying customer, we’ll award you with the first month’s revenue from that customer. (You will need a Paypal account to receive the cash payments from us.)

The reward is a way for us to say thanks for letting people know you recommend Harvest, and it’s a great way for you to save money on your Harvest plan or earn extra cash on the side.

Give the program a spin and see how you can save and earn money, and let us know what you think!

Kiva.org has been using Harvest for over a year in its Microloan Review & Translation Program, and it’s not only an incredibly useful tool, but it has actually made us enjoy keeping track of our time! The Harvest time tracking widget is friendly and simple to use, and the website provides a nice array of options for managing its data while being very intuitive to learn.

As a small team in a rapidly growing organization, our program staff has found it invaluable to know where our time is going and how much efficiency we gain as we introduce new processes into our work. Recording time on specific projects via Harvest has helped us make decisions about budget, intern recruitment, and staff allocation.

It’s also great to have a central place to share information about our projects from week to week. Our team reviews our priorities weekly, using data from Harvest, and it’s the foundation for our communication about what we’re working on and how we can make the best use of our time as group.

My program staff found Harvest online and love it so much that they insisted that I sign up. As the team manager, I love the conversations Harvest enables and the visibility it gives us into each other’s working patterns.

Harvest has been such a success at Kiva that the Kiva Fellows Program will soon be using it to manage a team of over 100 Kiva Fellows each year. This group volunteers to work with Kiva’s Field Partners in over 40 countries throughout the developing world, and it’s a big challenge to keep in touch with what each of them is working on day-to-day. Through Harvest, we’re excited to have a simple tool to help all the Kiva Fellows keep program staff updated, and a tool that allows us to keep the fellows’ work aligned with Kiva’s evolving goals.

–Naomi Baer, Kiva Microloan Review & Translation Director

Interested in making micro-loans to entrepreneurs in need from around the world? We encourage you to learn more about Kiva.org and see how they’re living up to their mantra, “loans that change lives.”

Dee Zsombor, one of the Harvest’s prime hackers, uncovered further issues with the fixed Ruby version 1.8.7, which is patch level 173. This upgrade includes a flawed BigDecimal#to_f coercion method:

BigDecimal("10.03").to_f
=> 10.3

We are fairly confident Harvest users are not interested in this bizzaro-world version of rounding.

If you are running a Rails application and you have applied the Ruby 1.8.7 DoS patch, we’ve got the fix for you. Place the following hack in your environment.rb file (or an initializer if you prefer):

if BigDecimal("10.03").to_f != 10.03
 class BigDecimal
   def to_f
     self.to_s.to_f
   end
 end
end

If your interpreter is broken like ours was, this will cure what ails it. Big thanks to Dee for writing up this fix.

Here is a short, 2-minute video to show you how the integration works:

Integration with Highrise from Harvest on Vimeo.

The integration set up is simple: just go to Manage > Account Settings and put in your Highrise log-in credentials, and that’s it.  Harvest will verify the credentials and pull in all necessary info.

Import Clients and Client Contacts

Go to Manage > Clients, and with just a click of a button, you’ll see all the companies in your Highrise account, and you can choose which ones to import.  On the next step, you can then choose which people under each company to import.  These are your client contacts - whom you can send invoices to.  Harvest will pull in the contact details and map them to the appropriate fields.

Import Won Deals

In Highrise you can track deals (or proposals).  Once you win a deal, just go to  your Harvest account under Manage > Projects, and you can import that won deal and start tracking time for the newly won project!  Another neat thing about this integration is that if the won deal belongs to a new client that’s not yet in your Harvest account, the integration will automatically add that client to your account.  The details are all taken care of for you - all you need to worry about is winning that deal!

If you’re a Highrise user looking to give Harvest a try, feel free to sign up for our free trial and give the integration a spin.  You’ll be tracking time and sending invoice in no time!

Big thank-you to our very own Barry Hess for making the Harvest + Highrise integration possible.

Taxes can’t be described as fun, but I actually don’t mind the process of doing my estimated taxes each quarter. I made it as easy as possible on myself by doing a few things at the start of the year. First, I grabbed the 2009 1040-ES form for the IRS. Before I printed it out, I filled in the information that wouldn’t change- my name, social security number, and address- on each of the four forms. I printed that sucker as well as four envelopes with the IRS address (The address for your region is on page 6 of the 1040-ES PDF) and my return address. I’m based in Illinois, so I did the same thing for the IL-1040-ES state form (use google to find your state’s 1040-ES form). I also marked the four estimated tax due dates in my calendar to remind myself a week before-hand that they were fast approaching!

The due dates for estimated taxes as well as the timeframe for each are as follows:

• April 15, 2009 (payments received from January 1 - March 31, 2009)
• June 15, 2009 (payments received from April 1 - May 31, 2009)
• September 15, 2009 (payments received from June 1 - August 31, 2009)
• January 15, 2010 (payments received from September 1 - December 31, 2009)

Putting in this extra effort at the beginning made me feel super organized about the whole process. It allows me to grab two forms and two envelopes and start crunching some numbers. That’s where Harvest comes in!

I do my estimated taxes by payments received (instead of hours invoiced, which is another option), so each quarter I create a Payment Report by navigating to Invoices > Report > Create New Report. I check off Payments Received Report, change the timeframe to custom so that I can select the appropriate quarter dates, and leave Clients set to All.

The first time I printed a Payment Report, I was pleasantly surprised at how clean and simple it looked. It’s perfect to file for my records. I do the math right on that print out so that everything is together. I multiply the total payment by my state tax percentage (3%) and cut a check to the Illinois Department of Revenue. On the check, I make sure to note the form name (IL-1040-ES) and my social security number. I do the same thing for the IRS. The percentage for federal tax is a little bit trickier to figure out. It’s based on your income as well as if you’re filing as a single, head of household, or jointly with your spouse. There’s a handy worksheet on page 5 of the 1040-ES form to help figure out the correct percentage. I’m lucky enough to have an accountant in the family, so I also asked his advice on the right percentage for me. I err on the side of caution by overpaying now and possibly getting a tax return later rather than underpaying now and having to pay extra later.

Finally, I slap a stamp on those pre-printed envelopes and make a photocopy of the envelope, the estimated tax payment voucher form, and my personal check for both the state and federal taxes. I keep those on file with my Harvest Payment Report. And Bam! I’m ready to get back to making money!

A big thanks to Jennifer for taking the time to share her tip with the rest of the Harvest community.  We love hearing stories like this, so if you’d like to share a small business tip involving your use of Harvest, let us know!

Thank you for your patience and continued support.

We are always happy to deliver more value to our customers without raising prices whenever we can. Today, we have an opportunity to do just that. For our Basic and Solo customers, we’ve activated an option which allows you to use SSL for your connection to Harvest. This means the connection between you and Harvest (whether you’re using a browser, desktop widget, or iPhone) will be encrypted by a secure, industry-standard SSL certificate. In other words, with SSL, everything from time entries to your invoices are encrypted and transmitted securely between our service and you. This is the same technology used by online banks and e-commerce sites.  We understand the sensitive nature of your data and we hope this extra security measure will further put your mind at ease as you use Harvest for your time tracking and invoicing needs. To activate SSL for your account, simply navigate to Manage > Account Settings > Preferences and update the “Use SSL” attribute. (Note: Business plans already use SSL connection for all communications)

Unlimited Clients and Projects for Solo Plan

Harvest Solo plans (which are actually expandable up to 3 users) also get a new update. Users of this plan can now track unlimited number of clients and projects within Harvest. Whether tracking time on an handful of active projects or keeping a handy and complete list of all your client contacts in Harvest, our new Harvest Solo plan is designed to make your life simpler. (Note: Business and Basic plans already enjoy unlimited clients and projects)

We hope you enjoy these plan updates and stay tuned for more great stuff coming later this month!

Job Opportunity: Harvest Community Manager – please feel free to apply, pass it on, and let your friends know!