You bill by the hour. You have clients. You do work. At the end of the month, you need to know how many hours went to each client and what to put on the invoice. That was the whole job.
You looked for a time tracking tool. Harvest came up. Popular with agencies and consultants. Clean interface. A start/stop timer that worked. You signed up for the free plan, hit the project limit, and moved to the paid tier.
Now you have a tool that tracks time, generates invoices, tracks project budgets, manages team capacity, forecasts resource allocation, and tracks expenses. You use the timer and the summary report. The rest runs in the background while the bill arrives each month.
What the Practice Actually Opens
The time entry screen. The summary by client for the month. Occasionally the invoice export.
That is the job most small professional services practices hired Harvest to do. Log time against a client or matter, see the total, and hand it off to an invoice.
Harvest also does team utilisation reports, project budget burn rates, time-off tracking, expense logging with receipt photos, Forecast integration for capacity planning, and a full analytics suite for agency leadership. Two to three people in a small practice use two features.
- Team utilisation and capacity reports
- Project budget burn rate tracking
- Expense logging with receipt attachments
- Resource forecasting via Forecast integration
- Invoice generation with Stripe or PayPal
- Manager approval workflows
- Detailed analytics for agency leadership
- Start/stop timer per client or matter
- Monthly time summary by client
- Export for invoicing
Who Harvest Is Actually Built For
Harvest is a serious tool for agencies with a project management function. Ten or more people. A resourcing manager tracking who is available for what. Account managers watching project budgets in real time. A director who reviews utilisation reports to decide whether to hire.
If your practice is two to five people billing by the hour, you need a time log and a monthly summary. The rest of Harvest is infrastructure for a different business.
The Cost of Three Years of Time Tracking
Harvest charges per seat. A small team of three people pays around A$60 a month. That is A$2,160 over three years for a timer and a summary report.
Picture a three-person consulting firm that has used Harvest for three years. They log time. They pull the monthly report. They have never opened the capacity planning screen or the project budget tool. They paid A$2,160 to access the equivalent of a spreadsheet with a nicer timer.
What a Merebase time tracker Includes
A Merebase time tracker is built for the billing job your practice actually has. You describe the clients and matters you track against, the way you categorise work, and the summary format your invoicing needs. The app is built to do exactly that.
What a Merebase time tracker includes:
Time entry against any client or matter. Running total by client for the current period. Monthly summary with export for invoicing. Search and filter by client, date, or type. Full data export at any time. Unlimited users. A$499 once. You bring your own hosting. A basic plan runs A$5 to A$20 a month.
There is no capacity planning module you will never open. No expense tracking dashboard. No integration with a forecasting tool your team does not use. The app logs time, totals it by client, and exports for invoicing. That is the job.
If you need to track expenses or generate invoices directly from the time log later, that is a scoped conversation. Each addition is priced in writing before any payment.