SaralFlow vs Harvest
Harvest
Harvest is an excellent time tracking and invoicing platform trusted by thousands of businesses worldwide.
SaralFlow
SaralFlow is designed for organizations that need more than time tracking—bringing together project delivery, approvals, leave management, project finance, billing, costing, and reporting in one connected platform.
- Free for 45 days
- Every app included
- No credit card required
WHERE HARVEST DOES BETTER
Harvest is genuinely difficult to beat on simplicity
The live timer is one of its strongest features. Team members can start tracking work with one click and forget about it until they finish. That sounds like a small detail, but it helps people capture accurate hours without trying to remember what they worked on later.
The reporting experience is also excellent. Managers can quickly build reports by client, project, or team. Reports can be saved, shared, and exported with very little effort. Harvest also connects naturally with invoicing — tracked hours flow directly into invoices, which reduces duplicate work for businesses that bill clients based on time.
If your business mainly needs time tracking, budgeting, and invoicing, Harvest remains one of the strongest options available.
WHERE HARVEST SHOWS ITS LIMITS
The Real Story — based on teams who switched to SaralFlow
As teams grow, project managers also need to manage resource allocations, leave requests, delivery approvals, project ownership, and utilization across multiple clients. Harvest does not try to solve all of these problems. It simply focuses on being a time tracking platform instead of a complete delivery management solution. This often leads to another problem.
The business starts replying on Excel. Project allocations live in one spreadsheet. Resource planning lives in another. Leave calendars are managed somewhere else. Managers export Harvest reports every week before combining everything into spreadsheets that leadership can actually use. Nothing is technically broken — there are simply too many moving parts. For a 10 person agency, this may be perfectly manageable. For a 50 person software services company, it quickly becomes difficult to maintain.
A STORY THAT WILL FEEL FAMILIAR
Here is what a typical month-end looks like at a 15 person service company running on spreadsheets. There is usually one person, let us call him Rahul, doing the work of HR administrator, project coordinator, and finance assistant all at once. Her month-end involves at least three Excel files that do not talk to each other.
Rahul
Operations Manager, software development company ~ 30 consultants
When the company was small, Harvest worked well. Everyone tracked their time, project managers reviewed reports, and invoices were generated without much effort. As new clients arrived and more projects started running at the same time, Rahul noticed a different problem.
Harvest showed who had worked on a project. It did not help him decide who should be assigned next.
- Consultant availability spreadsheet
- Project allocations spreadsheet
- Approved leave tracker
Rahul exported reports from Harvest, copied data into Excel, checked which consultants were available, compared planned allocations against actual hours, confirmed leave approvals, and finally built a management report for Monday morning. One forgotten update in a spreadsheet could create confusion across several projects.
After another quarter of growing manual work, Rahul started looking for alternatives. He wasn’t searching for a better timer. Harvest already handled that well. He was searching for a better way to manage delivery. That search led him to SaralFlow.
After moving across, his team no longer needed separate spreadsheets for project allocations, leave management, structured approvals, and delivery visibility. Project managers worked inside one system instead of switching between Harvest and multiple Excel files throughout the week. The biggest improvement was not saving a few clicks — it was having confidence that everyone was looking at the same information. Monday management meetings became discussions about delivery instead of conversations about whether the spreadsheet was up to date.
WHERE SARALFLOW STANDS OUT
Designed around how delivery teams actually operate
The platform feels less like a time tracker and more like a delivery operations system. For companies growing beyond twenty or thirty people, that difference becomes increasingly valuable.
Advanced Timesheet Approvals
Approve in bulk, reopen submitted entries when corrections are needed, and maintain a complete audit trail. Day-level and task-level submission workflows included.
Built-in Leave Management
LeaveHub is included in the platform, not a separate tool. Leave requests, approvals, balances, and calendar visibility all in the same system as your timesheets.
Structured Project Allocations
Mandatory project dates, billing types, and team allocations within the same platform — not spread across different tools or spreadsheets
Company Delivery Dashboards
Leadership gets a broader view of delivery health without exporting data into spreadsheets. Project managers and founders see the same picture.
Project Finance Add-on
Billing profiles, budget tracking, and revenue calculation connected to your timesheets. Only the people who need financial access require this add-on.
Role-Based Access Control
Project managers see timesheets and leave. Finance leaders see billing rates and budgets. Confidential information stays appropriately separated.
Quick Comparison
Every row below comes directly from the comparison in this guide — no marketing spin.
|
Feature
|
Harvest
|
SaralFlow
|
|---|---|---|
|
Time tracking
|
Manual time entry and weekly timesheets
|
Manual time entry with weekly and monthly views
|
|
Timesheet Submission
|
No day-level or task-level submission workflow
|
Submit timesheets at task, day, or week level
|
|
Timesheet Approval
|
Limited approval workflow depending on plan
|
Flexible day-level, task-level, and bulk approval workflows
|
|
Timesheet Corrections
|
Limited reopening and correction workflows
|
Managers can reject, reopen, and correct timesheets at task, day, or week level
|
|
Timesheet Compliance
|
No timesheet locking feature
|
Lock timesheets to enforce submission deadlines
|
|
Timesheet Audit Trail
|
Limited
|
Track when timesheets are created, updated, submitted, and approved
|
|
Leave & Time Management
|
Not included
|
Vacation, time-off, and company holiday management with LeaveHub
|
|
Project Planning
|
Basic project setup
|
Project dates, billing type, planned task hours, task dates, and task status
|
|
Project Team Allocation
|
Basic team assignment
|
Allocation dates control when team members can enter time on a project
|
|
Project Roles & Permissions
|
Basic project access and reporting permissions
|
Granular roles for administrators, project managers, capacity management, clients, and users
|
|
Project Financial Management
|
Basic billing rate, cost rate at user level and profitability tracking
|
Billing profiles, Billing rates at org and project level, direct and indirect costs, overheads, project commercials, and financial dashboards
|
|
Pre-Invoicing Workflow
|
Not available
|
Capture client-approved hours before sending them for invoicing
|
|
Invoicing
|
Available
|
Planned for future release
|
|
Expense Tracking
|
Available
|
Planned for future release
|
WHICH ONE SHOULD YOU CHOOSE?
Both products solve real problems
The question is whether your biggest challenge right now is tracking time — or managing delivery.
Choose Harvest if
Choose SaralFlow if
Neither platform is the right choice for every business. Harvest excels at simplicity and time tracking, while SaralFlow is designed for organizations that need broader project operations and financial management capabilities.
Frequently Asked Questions
Organizations can migrate from Harvest to SaralFlow by exporting projects, clients, employees, and time entries from Harvest and importing them into SaralFlow. The migration process is designed to minimize disruption so teams can continue tracking work while historical data is transferred.
No. Harvest focuses on time tracking, expense tracking, and invoicing. It does not include built-in leave management or leave approval workflows, so many businesses rely on separate HR software or spreadsheets to manage employee leave.
Yes. SaralFlow reduces the need for spreadsheets by bringing project tracking, employee management, leave management, approvals, billing, costing, and reporting into one centralized platform. Instead of maintaining multiple Excel files, teams can manage project operations from a single source of truth.
Consulting firms that only need time tracking and invoicing may find Harvest sufficient. However, consulting businesses managing multiple projects, approvals, utilization, leave, and project profitability typically benefit more from SaralFlow's integrated project operations capabilities
Yes. SaralFlow includes structured approval workflows for timesheets and leave requests in its Free plan. Managers can review, approve, reject, or reopen submissions while maintaining a complete audit trail for better project governance.
Harvest includes invoicing and budgeting features, but it is not designed as a comprehensive project finance solution. Organizations needing costing, billing profiles, commercial management, financial roles, and pre-invoicing generally require additional tools or a platform like SaralFlow.
Yes. SaralFlow provides onboarding assistance and product guidance to help teams adopt the platform efficiently. The level of training depends on the organization's implementation requirements.
Yes. SaralFlow is designed for growing professional services organizations. Teams can start with core project management capabilities and expand into approvals, leave management, employee management, project finance, costing, billing, and reporting as the business scales.
Get Started Today
See what delivery operations feel like when it's all one system
Get connected apps, smart automation, and secure hosting —Free for 45 days.