Harvest is an online time-tracker from Iridesco. It was principally designed with clients who bill hourly in mind, but it scales nicely and can track groups or entire offices with simple group management and alerting features.

You can see Part 1 and Part 2 of a video walk-through I created if you’re interested in how the application works. You’ll need to hit the full-screen link beneath each video in order to see the features in any detail. :)

Harvest is a simple online time tracking application built and maintained by Iridesco, a New York-based web design and consulting firm (among many other things, they created the template for this blog and our parent site).

I met Danny Wen and Shawn Liu, the founders of Iridesco, at their New York office and talked to them about the impetus for Harvest and their plans for the future. They Googled time tracking to show me there was no shortage of applications in this space. But despite the crowded market, they have found very few applications tailored to small businesses.

Friends and colleagues in consulting and design shops echoed their frustration over the lack of a simple solution, and the partners smelled opportunity. Starting in December 2005, the pair set out to create an application “built to the needs of the small business community,” Shawn said.

As for what’s coming down the pipe for Harvest. Danny pointed me to their blog and the just-released API for Harvest. It has limited functionality at the moment, but a more full-featured release is in the works.

The other imminent development is a Mac widget. I got a preview and it efficiently ports the one-click stopwatch (definitely one of Harvest’s UI highlights) onto the desktop of your Mac, making it that much easier to track task-specific time without getting bogged down in a hundred clicks.

Future developments planned for Harvest include an input for upfront time estimates to track your expected versus actual time put into a project, and rates to show you what your billable hours are producing for you income-wise in Harvest reporting.

Long-term, the pairs’ goal is to make Harvest into “more than just time-tracking software,” Danny said. Eventually, they plan to build a full suite of productivity tools into Harvest. They told me that they are comfortable with their present growth trajectory, and not interested in taking any outside capital.

Check out my video review if you want a closer look at the program’s features. Having used Harvest myself for a billable project in October, the bottom line is the software is easy to use and efficiently scales to administer multiple users. So whether you’re a one/two-man shop or managing several teams, Harvest for simple time tracking is definitely worth a look.

Jonah Keegan is an entrepreneur with a business, a blog and a few other things.