How to move from Harvest to Hourtick, step by step

Before you start: pick a switch date

Switch on the first day of a billing period, such as the first of the month, after everything up to that day is invoiced in Harvest. Then no hour is billed from two tools, and everything before the date lives in Harvest's export.

1. Export everything from Harvest

1. Time: as an Administrator, open Settings > Import/Export and choose Export all time. Every time entry downloads as one CSV file; for large accounts Harvest emails you when it's ready.
2. Invoices and estimates: on the same page, export all invoices and all estimates. Each downloads as a zip of PDFs.
3. Projects: in Projects, use Export to download active, budgeted or archived projects as Excel or CSV.
4. Clients: in Manage > Clients, use Import/Export to download clients and client contacts.
5. Store the files with your accounting records before you cancel anything.

2. Recreate clients, projects and rates

In Hourtick, add a client per customer and a project per engagement, with its billing type, hourly rate and budget in hours. Every new project gets the common task types (design, development, meetings and so on); mark which ones are billable.

With many projects, let your AI assistant do it. Connect Claude, ChatGPT, Codex or another MCP client to Hourtick as an admin, attach Harvest's projects export, and ask it to create each client and project with its rate and budget. It uses Hourtick's create_client and create_project tools and reports back what it made, so you can check the list before the team joins.

3. Decide what to do with past hours

• Most teams keep Harvest's time export as the record and start fresh in Hourtick from the switch date. Invoicing and audits work fine with a clear before and after.
• If you want recent history in Hourtick, each person brings their own: their AI assistant reads their rows from the export and logs them with Hourtick's log_time tool. Time is always logged as the person who runs it, so one admin can't re-log the whole team.
• If you bring invoiced hours over, mark them invoiced in Reports right away. They lock, and can't be billed twice.

4. Invite the team and switch

1. Invite everyone with a link. Every plan includes unlimited people, so there's no seat count to plan.
2. Install the Mac menu bar app, or track in the browser.
3. Turn on weekly timesheet approvals if you want them. In Harvest they need the Enterprise plan; in Hourtick they're on every plan.
4. Cancel or downgrade Harvest once your first period in Hourtick is invoiced.

What changes, and what you'll miss

• Tasks and team chat sit next to the timer, so time is tracked on the work itself.
• AI agents can take tasks and log their time, shown as the agent in Reports.
• No per-seat price: free for unlimited people with 500 MB of usage a month, or $29/month for 5 GB.
• Hourtick doesn't send invoices or track expenses. Keep an invoicing or accounting tool, and export billable hours from Reports as CSV.