Harvest ➡️ Timemator ➡️ Toggl ➡️ Harvest

I’m moving away from American services in favor of European ones. This time I tried to switch from Harvest, my time-tracking software, but I couldn’t find a reliable alternative.

The first time I used Harvest was 12 years ago, when I started working at Angi Studio. I had a love/hate relationship with time-tracking, but it was never because of the software (my problem was forgetting to start timers, and unclarity on what to write as working hours). Harvest simply works, which is why I chose it again when I started freelancing.

Besides time-tracking, Harvest offers forecasting, planning, budgeting, reporting, expenses and invoicing. I’m using Moneybird for expenses and invoicing, and haven’t used the forecasting extensively. This makes switching easy for me: I only require time tracking.

Harvest offers nice integrations and a powerful API (which I used a couple of weeks ago to make a target-dashboard), these extensions are a nice bonus.

The options #

My main focus was finding an app in Europe that is single-pay. The one thing I didn’t like about Harvest were the recurring costs which total 185 euro per year.

A quick search found me Timemator: one-time payment, built in Germany 🇩🇪. Data is stored locally and synced through iCloud (optionally). There is an iPhone app, which is rated quite high.

I also considered Timebird (built in The Netherlands 🇳🇱) as it integrates with Moneybird, but Timemator is easily more feature-complete.

Timemator #

I installed the app, set it up, worked with it. Was great. Wrote a review. And then it lost my notes.

There’s one thing apps shouldn’t do, and that’s lose user data. Sadly, I’m not the only one and it hasn’t been fixed for three months already.

Sadly, Timemator was out.

Toggl #

As the single-pay option didn’t work, I searched for alternative and found Toggl (🇪🇪 Estonia). This is one of the more famous time-tracking apps, and it indeed looks beautiful.

I had the most trouble getting my Harvest data into Toggl, and had to resort to ChatGPT to format the CSV-data for me. Toggl needs certain headers, toggl needs time to be just so, toggl needs an emailaddress, toggl needs… Ugh. Can we talk about what I need?

Onboarding shouldn’t be this hard.

In the end I managed to import everything. Toggl shows my tracked time. Yay.

But now comes the second round of setting up Toggl, which is my billable rates. I like to see cold-hard-cash instead of hours, thank you very much.

I got stuck in setting these rates. My rates differ per project and sometimes within projects (different months).

Here comes the snag about Toggl’s data-model, which is different from my mental model. In Toggl you cannot set tasks as billable, but instead have to set individual time entries as billable. I now need to go through all timesheets and set them as billable. I guess I should’ve done this on import?

I have four options now:

Set time entries to be billable through Toggl. But I can do this only in batches of 50 entries, because Toggl only allows you to make changes for entries on the page instead of “all”
Erase all data, update the CSV with billable rate (it is exported by Harvest), re-import
Screw previous data, start fresh in Toggl
Stop the Toggl-experiment all-together

I’ve decided on the last one. Sorry, this experiment is taking me too much time (I can see how much in Harvest), with setting up Timemator first and then Toggl…

Conclusion #

Toggl is probably a good European alternative to Harvest. But I have other work to do instead of trying it out 😃

Future work #

Toggl has over 5 million users if their marketing material is to be believed. Immediately this triggered my “how hard can it be to create my own”-feeling. If I can make 5000 people switch… 😉