Easy Harvest

A desktop app for quickly booking and reviewing time entries in Harvest, without opening the web UI.

What it does

• Day view — see and edit time entries for any day; a live progress bar tracks how much of your recorded work time has been booked into Harvest, with an indicator showing overtime or unbooked hours
• Work day tracker — record start, break, and end times to track actual hours at work; past days can be edited at any time
• Vacation — log vacation entries in bulk across a date range (weekends and public holidays skipped automatically)
• Stats — year-to-date balance, overtime, holiday days used and remaining; manual overtime adjustments
• Billable overview — per-project billable breakdown for the year, filterable by month
• Project budgets — define hour budgets across one or more projects and track usage with a live progress bar
• Entry templates — save project+task+notes combinations for entries you book often (e.g. "Travel Luzern-Olten")
• Settings — work profile (weekly hours, percentage, vacation days), carryover values, Swiss public holidays, data folder, and launch-at-startup

The API token is stored in the system keyring (GNOME Keyring, KWallet, Windows Credential Manager, macOS Keychain), with a plain-file fallback on headless Linux.

Platform

OS	Status
Linux (X11 / Wayland with AppIndicator)	Full support, system tray icon via D-Bus SNI
Windows	Full support, system tray icon in the taskbar notification area
macOS	Supported — no system tray (closing the window exits the app)

On GNOME Wayland, tray icons require the AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support shell extension.

Building

Linux

Requires Rust (stable) and GTK 3 + D-Bus development headers for the tray:

# Fedora / RHEL
sudo dnf install gtk3-devel dbus-devel

# Ubuntu / Debian
sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev libdbus-1-dev

cargo run --release

Windows

Requires Rust (stable). No extra system libraries needed.

cargo run --release

macOS

Requires Rust (stable). No extra system libraries needed.

cargo run --release

To distribute as a proper .app bundle (so the app appears in Finder and Spotlight), install cargo-bundle and run:

cargo install cargo-bundle
cargo bundle --release

This produces target/release/bundle/osx/Easy Harvest.app. You can drag it to /Applications like any other Mac app.

Note: Without code signing the app will be blocked by Gatekeeper on first launch. Right-click → Open to bypass it, or sign with an Apple Developer certificate.

Launch at startup is managed via a LaunchAgent plist written to ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.easyharvest.plist. The toggle in Settings handles this automatically.

Cross-compiling for Windows (from Linux)

Install the target and MinGW toolchain once:

rustup target add x86_64-pc-windows-gnu

# Fedora / RHEL
sudo dnf install mingw64-gcc

# Ubuntu / Debian
sudo apt install gcc-mingw-w64-x86-64

Then build:

cargo build --release --target x86_64-pc-windows-gnu

The binary is produced at target/x86_64-pc-windows-gnu/release/easy_harvest.exe.

The first run shows a wizard to set the data folder and connect to Harvest (Personal Access Token + Account ID from harvestapp.com → Settings → Developers).

Windows SmartScreen: Because the binary is not code-signed, Windows may show a "Windows protected your PC" warning on first launch. Click More info → Run anyway to proceed. This is expected for unsigned open-source apps.

Data

All state (settings, favorites, work day records, templates, overtime adjustments, project budgets) is stored as JSON in the data folder you choose during setup. Pointing this at a OneDrive or Dropbox folder syncs everything across devices.

Changing the data folder in Settings migrates all existing files to the new location automatically.

Notes

• Swiss public holidays (central cantons) are used for working day calculations and vacation entry creation.
• Expected hours per day are calculated from weekly hours × work percentage.
• Harvest API entries that are locked or billed cannot be edited from the app.