Five years ago, we created Harvest with two goals: to take the pain (and ugly) out of time tracking, and to create a powerful report that’s easy to read by normal people like you and me. What we came up with was a deceptively simple and visual interface on top of layers of complex data. You can quickly glance at a report and find out what projects are consuming the most of your business’s time, and click one button to see distribution of billable hours.

Over the years, the reporting tool became more sophisticated with even more data: billable amount, budget, invoiced vs uninvoiced hours, etc. Frankly, the original interface structure is not holding up to the amount of data points Harvest supports today.

Late last year, we set out to improve Reports. We started with a customer survey, and thanks to your participation, we received a ton of amazing feedback. We sifted through your comments and boiled everything down to a few major goals, providing us with a solid direction as we began our overhaul of Reports. We’ve been working hard on this project since January, and have internally nicknamed the project “Reports 2.0.” Here’s a preview:

project-time-tracking-report

We’ve broken up the goals into different milestones, and the initial release of Reports 2.0 is coming Tuesday, March 8th. Here are some of the highlights that you can expect:

  1. Blazing fast report render – Our development team rebuilt the reporting engine from scratch, taking advantage of some of the cool, new things that came from Rails 3.
  2. A spanking new Staff report – This is one of the highest requested reports from the survey, and we added a few bells and whistles to make it easier to scan the report.
  3. Improved navigation and data layout – You’ll see a brief summary of important data points on top, and a clearer table structure makes it easier to digest numbers and details.

And there are many more improvements and surprises for you to uncover next week. Our design and development team have poured their hearts into this project and it’s a work of beauty. We can’t wait to share the fruits of our labor, and thank you all for your patience, support and feedback!