Consistency across an application like Harvest is important, but sometimes it can be difficult to maintain. We’ve been in the market for seven years, and many different people at different times have worked on the same code.

Right now if you export Harvest time data, you’ll get files with different fields of information. Different methods of export yield different results. You can:

  • Go to Reports > Detailed Time and export to one of the possible formats.
  • Go to Reports > Time and again export to one of the available formats. This export yields a document with slightly different fields in a different order than the Detailed Time export. However, if you export the data for one single person on your team, the report will have three fewer fields.
  • Go to your Account Settings and click on Download Company Time Data. This kind of export gives you the same format as the Reports > Time export.

This inconsistency can be pretty confusing. To fix that, we plan to unify these time exports so that they provide you with the same information no matter how you choose to export. This simplifies the logic so that we can continue to deliver new features while keeping the code clean and our minds (yours and ours) sane.

We’re basing our updated exports on the Time export, since it’s the most complete and the most widely used (there are almost five times more Time Report exports than Detailed Time Report exports). We’re using this chance to order the columns in these reports to make more sense.

Here is an example export so that you can get an idea of what our changes will look like. We plan to release this change within the next few days. If you have any questions about our update, just drop us a line at support@harvestapp.com.