2026-08-19

How to export everything from Harvest before your renewal

Harvest has no single “export my account” button. Getting a complete copy out takes five exports from three parts of the app, in a particular order. Do it before the renewal, not after.

The five exports

1. Clients and contacts. Manage → Clients. Export the list. Every other file refers to these names.
2. Tasks. Manage → Tasks. Names and whether each is billable by default.
3. Projects. Manage → Projects, with codes, clients and budgets. Note which are archived; some exports drop them.
4. Time entries. Settings → Import/Export → Export all time, or Reports → Detailed time for a date range with rates. Large exports arrive by email. This is the file that matters, and it is the one most likely to be truncated by a date range.
5. Invoices. Invoices → Report as CSV, plus the ZIP of PDFs from Import/Export if you need the documents themselves.

Harvest’s help pages describe each screen. The formats are CSV, Excel, PDF and ZIP; there is no JSON and no database dump.

What the files leave out

• Rate history. The detailed time report carries the rate that applied to each entry, but not when a person’s rate changed. You have to reconstruct that.
• Per-entry rate overrides, which look like ordinary entries with an unusual amount.
• Negative entries. They are in the file, but most importers on the other side drop anything under a minute and never say so.
• Which projects were archived, depending on the screen you exported from.

The other way

The Winnows importer reads the account through Harvest’s API with a personal access token: clients, projects, tasks, people, assignments, every time entry for the span you choose. It reconstructs rate history from the entries, keeps overrides, imports negative entries with their sign, and ends with a report that compares every total against Harvest’s, to the cent. Re-running it syncs what changed, so you can keep both tools through the switchover and reconcile once at the end.