Moving from Harvest

Connect Harvest and BillGrid brings your business over in one pass: clients and contacts, projects, people, time, expenses, and your past invoices, estimates and payments. You see what Harvest holds and choose how each person, client and project comes over before anything is saved. Most accounts take a few minutes. The account owner imports, on any plan.

1. Connect Harvest

Open Settings > Import data and choose Connect Harvest.
Choose Connect Harvest again and sign in to Harvest as an administrator. An administrator sees everyone's time and every invoice; anyone else brings only their own.
Allow access. Harvest doesn't offer read-only access, but BillGrid only reads: nothing in Harvest changes.

Settings, Import data: Client list, Harvest with Connect Harvest, and Expenses — Every import starts in Settings > Import data.

The Harvest connection in BillGrid: what it reads, Before you connect, and the Connect Harvest button — One connection brings the whole account. Use CSV instead if you only want a few clients and hours.

2. Let BillGrid read your account

Keep the page open while BillGrid reads, page by page, at the pace Harvest allows. If you leave, it pauses; come back and it carries on where it stopped. Years of time take a few minutes.

Reading Harvest: a progress bar with 2,024 records read

3. Review

What Harvest holds

BillGrid counts what it found: clients, projects, contacts and people, hours and expenses, invoices and estimates, with totals in each currency. Choose a year or dates to bring only part of your history, or only the work you haven't billed yet. Nothing is imported at this point.

A Harvest account read by BillGrid: 18 clients, 14,915.75 hours, 384 invoices, with totals in euros and dollars — Totals are as Harvest records them, draft invoices included, so you can compare them with your Harvest reports.

Match people, clients and projects

For each person, client and project, choose what it becomes in BillGrid:

Use one you already have, when it's already in BillGrid, for example a client you imported from a CSV, or a teammate you invited. Its time and documents join it, and its own settings stay as they are.
Bring it in new. A person you don't link comes over as a past teammate: their time keeps their name, with no sign-in, invitation or paid seat.

When a name or email matches, BillGrid suggests it, but you choose every one. To give someone their past time on their own BillGrid sign-in, invite them before you import and link them here.

Match to BillGrid: two Harvest people linked to teammates, one kept as a historical contributor, two new clients and a new project — Linked teammates keep their sign-in and rates. Someone who has left stays on their past time.

4. Import

Choose Import reviewed data and keep the page open until it finishes. BillGrid then checks every record it saved against what it read from Harvest.

Importing Harvest: 2,140 of 5,616 records processed

Import verified: 18 clients, 41 projects, 6 people, 4,812 time entries, 220 expenses, 384 invoices, 45 estimates and 90 payments — You can import again later, for example after more work in Harvest. Nothing comes over twice, and what you've changed in BillGrid stays.

What comes over

Clients and contacts, with their currency and address.
Projects, with their currency, rates and hourly budgets. A fixed-fee project comes over as a fixed-fee project; add its milestones in BillGrid when you bill the rest of the fee.
Tasks and time: each day's hours, person, task, notes and the rate it was billed at. Hours Harvest already invoiced stay invoiced, so they're never billed again.
Expenses, in their own currency, with their category and whether they were billed.
Invoices, estimates and payments, as history on each client. They're there to look back on: BillGrid doesn't send, remind or charge them, or turn them into new documents.

Cost rates, Harvest roles and rates planned by task are kept as notes on the imported records. BillGrid doesn't round time to billing increments; each entry keeps the hours Harvest recorded.

After the import

Collect open Harvest invoices in Harvest. They arrive as history, so no client is asked to pay twice. Bill new work from BillGrid.
Send your first invoice. Unbilled time and expenses wait on each client. See reviewing unbilled work.

If the import stops

Some records need a decision before they can come over, such as a timer still running in Harvest or a billable entry with no rate. The message names the record and its date. Fix it in Harvest, choose Read again, then import. Anything already imported stays, and nothing comes over twice.

Or use two exports

For only your clients and the hours you haven't billed, two Harvest exports do it without connecting your account.

Import your clients

In Harvest, open Clients > Import/Export. Choose Export contacts for primary contacts and email addresses, or Export clients for billing addresses.
In BillGrid, open Clients > Import CSV and choose the file.
Check the new clients, the columns BillGrid used and any rows it skips, then choose Import.

Clients already in BillGrid and repeated rows are skipped.

Import projects and unbilled hours

In Harvest, open the Detailed time report for the dates you want and export it as CSV.
In BillGrid, choose Import CSV again and choose that file.
Check each person's hours and who receives them, then import.

BillGrid adds any client that isn't here yet, makes each project an hourly project and logs the hours Harvest hasn't invoiced. Each entry keeps the explicit hourly rates the report shows, so entries with different rates keep them; a project default is set only when every row has the same rate. Review entries that need a rate before invoicing them. Non-billable hours come in as non-billable. Importing the same file again adds nothing; if hours or rates changed since, BillGrid asks you to review them first.

If you use QuickBooks Online, check which invoices it copies before you connect it.