Harvest retainer tracking: give clients a live balance URL from your Harvest data.
Harvest is the go-to time tracker for consultants who invoice clients — it handles time entries, invoices, and project budgets in one clean interface. But Harvest’s project budgets are internal alerts, not client-facing balance pages. When a retainer client wants to know how many hours they have left mid-cycle, there’s no Harvest URL that answers that question without giving them access to your entire Harvest account. HourTab fixes this: export your Harvest time entries as CSV, paste them in, and each client gets a public balance URL they can bookmark and check themselves.
Free forever for your first retainer · no credit card.
Why Harvest alone doesn’t solve the retainer question
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Harvest budgets alert you — not your client.
Harvest’s budget feature sends you a warning when you hit 80% of the project budget. The client sees nothing. There’s no “send this balance to your client” button in Harvest because Harvest isn’t designed for client self-service. HourTab is. Export your Harvest CSV and each client gets a public, permanent URL showing their current balance — updated every time you import.
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Harvest client access is all-or-nothing.
Harvest does have a client-facing view — but enabling it gives clients access to invoices, expenses, and all their projects. For a retainer client who just wants to check their hours balance, that’s significant overkill and raises questions about other invoices and projects they can now see. HourTab shows exactly one thing per URL: the retainer balance and the work log that produced it. Nothing else from your Harvest account.
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Your invoicing and your balance update are different cadences.
Harvest invoices go out monthly. But your retainer client might want to check their balance weekly, mid-cycle — especially on a busy month when they’re deciding whether to request more work before the reset. With HourTab, you import your Harvest CSV at whatever cadence makes sense — daily, weekly, twice a month. The public URL reflects the latest import. Your invoicing workflow in Harvest stays unchanged.
How it works with Harvest
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1
Create the retainer in HourTab. Name it, set the monthly hour allocation, and pick the cycle reset date. Two minutes per client.
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2
Export your Harvest time entries as CSV. In Harvest Reports, filter by client and date range (the current retainer cycle), then export as CSV. Paste it into HourTab. Every entry — date, task, hours, team member — appears in the client-visible work log.
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3
Send the balance URL. Each retainer generates a unique public link. Include it in the engagement letter or the first invoice. Clients check it themselves; you stop fielding the mid-cycle balance question.
Your Harvest workflow stays unchanged. You log time and send invoices exactly as before — and your clients get one self-service URL for the question they always ask.
“Harvest tracks my hours. My clients track their emails asking me for the balance.”
— Freelance developer billing 5 clients on retainer
HourTab closes the gap: one CSV export from Harvest, one permanent URL per client, no more balance emails.
Frequently asked questions
Does Harvest have a built-in client retainer view?
Not in the client-self-service sense. Harvest has project budgets (internal alerts) and client access (which exposes invoices and all projects). HourTab provides the narrow, shareable balance URL that sits between those two extremes.
Do I need a Harvest paid plan to export CSV?
No. Any Harvest plan that lets you export time entries as CSV works with HourTab. Check your plan’s export options in the Reports section.
Will HourTab sync with Harvest automatically?
Not in v1. You export from Harvest and paste the CSV into HourTab. This takes about a minute and gives you full control over when the client-facing balance updates. API sync is on the roadmap.
Can I track multiple clients on retainer with separate share URLs?
Yes. Each client gets their own retainer record in HourTab with their own unique URL. You import each client’s Harvest CSV into their retainer separately.
What data from Harvest does HourTab use?
HourTab reads date, project/task, hours, and optionally team member from the Harvest CSV export. It doesn’t require invoice data, billable rates, or expense data.