How to export your data from Harvest (and keep a complete copy)

Whether you're switching tools, keeping a backup or sending figures to your accountant, Harvest gives you several ways to get your data out. Each one covers part of the picture, so it helps to know what you get from each before you rely on it.

This guide describes the options Harvest documents publicly. Menus and options change, so check Harvest's help center for the current steps.

What Harvest lets you export

Report exports (CSV or Excel)

Harvest's reports can be exported to CSV or Excel for the period and filters you choose. The detailed time report is the most useful one to keep: it lists individual time entries rather than totals.

What a report export contains

• In the detailed time report, one row per time entry, with the date, client, project, task, person, notes, hours and whether the time is billable.
• Rates and amounts, when your Harvest role is allowed to see them.
• Only the period and filters you picked: choose the widest period, and check that archived projects and people who have left are in the file.

What it misses

• Rate history. You see the figures in the report, not when each rate changed.
• Project setup: budgets, billing type, task and team assignments.
• Invoice lines and payments, and which entries were billed on which invoice.
• Receipt files for expenses. They're attachments, not spreadsheet columns.

Invoices (PDF)

Each invoice can be downloaded as a PDF. That's the right format for your records and your accountant, because it's exactly what the client received. But a PDF is a document, not data: its lines, taxes and payments can't be read back into another tool reliably.

The Harvest API: the structured copy

Harvest's API v2 gives structured access to the account: clients and contacts, projects with their task and team assignments, tasks, people with their billable and cost rates, time entries, invoices with their line items and payments, expenses and estimates.

Access uses a personal access token, created in Harvest ID under Developers. What a token can read depends on the role of the person who creates it, so ask a Harvest Administrator to create it. The API returns data, not files: you need a script, or a tool that reads it for you. Requests are rate-limited, so reading a large account takes a while.

How to keep a complete copy

1. Write down control totals from Harvest's reports: hours per project and per person for the whole history, and the total invoiced per client.
2. Export the detailed time report for the whole history to CSV or Excel.
3. If you track expenses, export the expense report as well and keep copies of the receipts you need.
4. Download the PDFs of the invoices you need to keep for your records.
5. For what spreadsheets miss (rates, budgets, invoice lines and payments), read the account through the API, with your own script or with a tool that does it for you.
6. Store everything in one dated folder outside Harvest, with the control totals, and check the files against them.

Moving the data into LockedHours

If the copy is for moving to LockedHours, you don't need the spreadsheets. LockedHours reads your Harvest account directly with a personal access token you create (see Create a Harvest access token), and brings across the clients, projects, tasks, people, rates, time entries, invoices and payments that the token can read. It only reads: nothing in Harvest is changed.

When the import finishes, a verification report compares hours per project, person and client, and the total billed per client, with Harvest's own figures, and lists any difference. See Import from Harvest and Read the import verification report. Your own exports are still worth keeping as an independent copy.

And if you ever leave LockedHours, Download export (.zip) in Settings → Data & account gives an admin the whole account: one CSV per table plus a JSON file. See Export all your data.