Introducing Reaper.io and Remote Nation
Mar 15, 2013 • Gabe WeaverHere at Cramer Dev, we are always trying new things. If we run into problems that haven’t been solved by existing software, or the stuff that’s out there just doesn’t work as well as we think it should, we figure out how to build something better. This week, we are proud to announce two new additions to our Labs - Reaper.io and Remote Nation.
Reaper.io
We use Harvest (try it for free) to track time and invoice clients. The problem is, we use Quickbooks to keep track of our finances and handle our accounting needs. For a while, Teri, our super-duper office administrator extraodinaire, was hand-keying all the invoice figures into Quickbooks each and every month. She does such a great job at taking care of us that we just couldn’t let this painful cycle continue any longer, so we built Reaper.io. It’s a simple Rails app that pulls in all your outstanding invoice information from Harvest and exports it as an IIF file so it can be easily imported into Quickbooks.
We figured other people must have the same frustration that Teri did, so we packaged it up as a publicly available, free resource for any other Harvest + Quickbooks users out there. We weren’t sure if it was going to get any reception, but we shared our creation with the Harvest team and they were thrilled that someone was solving the problem that Reaper.io addresses. They’ve had several requests for the same functionality, so it was really encouraging to get some positive feedback. Kudos to Brian, Travis, and Dan Volkens for taking the lead on building Reaper.
Remote Nation
As a remote distributed team, we’re always thinking of ways to improve our processes, become more efficient, and grow in our ability to communicate more effectively. With all the hoopla surrounding Yahoo’s decision to kill remote working, we felt it was the perfect time to start sharing our perspective on remote working. We wanted to create a place where we could share our insights, tips, and tools for the remote working community at large. We’ve got big plans for Remote Nation but we figured the best place to start was by sharing the ins and outs of how we work on a daily basis and what best practices we’ve put in place to ensure we deliver top notch work for all of clients, regardless of where they (or we) are located. Here are a few of the things we’ve written about so far: