Since starting our design and technology studio over three years ago, we’ve been in search of a good way to track the time we spend at work. We needed to answer questions like: How many hours have we spent on this project this month? How’s our utilization? What kind of tasks are we working on overall? What’s our breakdown in design vs. technology work? These questions were easy enough to answer in the beginning, but we got involved with more people and projects, it became increasingly less hard to tell. Excel was a mediocre solution at best. It was unable to scale efficiently as we merged project hours contributed by several team members.

We looked into several time tracking applications out there, but none of them suited us. Some were too expensive, charging exorbinant monthly fees or expensive one time purchasing fees. Others looked sorely out of date or just poorly designed. And yet, most were more complicated and bloated than we wanted to deal with.

After a long unfruitful search for a solution, we went down the road of designing our own. We wanted it to be web-based so that things like being on a Mac or a PC, at home or at a client site–none of that mattered. With nothing to install, you simply log in from any computer with a modern browser and an Internet connection.

Next, we wanted to stay truely minimal in defining our core feature set. We just need an easy way for everyone to report their time, and let us have an easy way to review the time and look at our overall studio time from a flexible perspective.

In time, our simple time tracking app, Harvest, was born and we’ve been happily using it internally for the last couple months. What is most rewarding is being able to see with renewed clarity and ease just where our time and efforts are going. With the information at hand, it has been helping us plan our workload more efficiently.

As we continue to refine Harvest, we’re getting it ready for use by other small business owners like us. Any freelancer, small business or small team can now get set up with a simple, and powerful time tracking solution in less than two minutes. In just a few days, any one can take Harvest for a free, no-hassle test drive. If you’d like us to notify you when we have things ready, sign up over at getharvest.com.

Time is money.

Update: We’re officially live. Go give it a try!