How to get your data out of Harvest
Do this before you cancel or downgrade, whatever you end up switching to. You want these files for your books regardless of where you land.
Downgrading can lock you out of your own invoice history. Harvest's free tier is limited to one seat and two projects. If you drop to it while you still have data you care about, you may lose access to records you can no longer reach — while the account still exists. Export first, then change the plan.
What to take
Four things, in the order that matters if you're interrupted.
Invoice PDFs
These are the hardest to reconstruct and the ones your accountant will ask for. Harvest generates them per invoice, so you download them one at a time from Invoices. Do this first, and keep the invoice numbers in the filenames.
Time entries
Reports → Time, set the date range to cover your whole history rather than the current period, and export to CSV. Check the export actually spans the range you asked for before you move on — a report defaulting back to this month is the usual way people end up with one month of history.
Clients, projects and rates
Your client list, your project list, and the bill rates attached to them. These are quick to retype for a small shop, but having them written down means you can set up somewhere else in one sitting instead of guessing at what a rate used to be.
Invoice payment records
What was paid, when, and against which invoice. If you only take the PDFs you'll have what you billed but not what settled, and reconstructing that from a bank statement is a bad afternoon.
Then check it
Open the time-entry CSV and confirm the oldest row is as old as you expect. Count your invoice PDFs against the invoice list. Both mistakes are recoverable while the account is still open and neither is afterwards.
Bringing it into Tally Whacker
There is no Harvest importer yet. It's being built, and this page will say so until it lands. For now, setting up is manual: add your people, your clients, your projects and your rates, which for a one-to-five person shop takes about ten minutes. Your Harvest history stays in the files you just exported, which is where your accountant wants it anyway.
Because bill rates are effective-dated, you can enter a rate as of the date it actually started and invoice historic periods correctly, rather than backdating anything by hand.
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