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In 2010, Connex Digital Co-Owner and CEO Paul Kortman started the agency with a mission to not only improve businesses through technology, but also provide superior service on each project. And over the last 14 years, he and his team of 10 have continued to do just that. 

Connex Digital focuses on optimizing workflow and automation for their clients, taking tedious, complex processes and transforming them into automated, efficient, highly productive processes. 

And Harvest has been an integral part of their workflows since the very beginning. 

“Right out of the gate, the demand was high for what I was offering and I needed to track time,” Paul said. “It was within six months that I started using Harvest for time tracking and invoicing — and I just didn't have to think about it.” 

Tracking the most important metric

As a professional services agency, it’s critical for Paul and his team to keep track of their most important metric: time. Harvest helps make that as easy as possible for them. 

“Time is money for us, unlike doing products where it's churn rate, LTV, and all that. For us, it's how many hours, how many minutes do we put in on a project — and that's how we make money. And so at the core of it, Harvest helps us keep track of our core metric and get paid for that.” 

Speaking of getting paid, Paul said Harvest stands out above the competition because it not only tracks the time but makes it easy to get paid for that time. 

“I”m a Harvest fanboy. I'll just put that right out there. There are alternative time trackers out there, but they don't get the concept of billing for this time. And it’s really nice to have that billing involved right away.” 

Onboarding with ease 

As Connex Digital’s team has changed throughout the years, Paul attributes the ease of Harvest onboarding to never having an issue getting started tracking time accurately and logging hours in real time. 

“It's very simple to install the app, put it on your phone, and now you have no excuse. You are always tracking time — and it's not tomorrow that you're putting in yesterday's time. It's not the end of the week. Which is what I did before I started Connex, and it was annoying and cumbersome and just not easy. Whereas with Harvest, none of the people we've worked with or have hired over the years have complained about it. It's just really simple — is the orange on or not?"

Paul added that it’s especially useful since the full-time team is paid by the hour, and they also work with contractors. 

“When we're working with contractors, they get paid based on the time that they put in. And we actually don't have salaried employees. Our employees are all full-time, but they're paid by the hour. And so if their time's not in harvest, they don't get paid.” 

And while it’s certainly easy for the team to track hours in real time, Director of Growth Andrés Berte loves that he can go in and correct time when needed. 

“What I like is a reminder of, ‘Hey, maybe you forgot your timer over the night.’ You can fix it. I click here and it's pretty easy to fix timers.”

Optimizing with integrations

The team not only tracks time and invoices with Harvest, but also uses it in combination with integrations to convert leads to projects automatically. 

“So you're working on a lead and when you convert that lead, you mark it as won and it automatically goes in Harvest all the client data, the project and name, even the budget. To be able to create projects automatically once we win a deal and have that information in there so your team can start tracking time against it right away is great.” 

In fact, Paul and his team love optimizing their workflows with Harvest and its integration capabilities so much that he and Andrés are now focused on helping others do the same. 

“I want to help Harvest users integrate and part of that is pulling the data out of Harvest, so that they can integrate everything across the board,” Paul said. 

To learn more about how to maximize your time tracking data with the Harvest and Zapier integration, save your seat in the upcoming webinar on Thursday, March 21 by registering here.