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For years, Harvest has helped our customers spend their time wisely. Harvest makes it easy to track your time across your tools, harness real-time insights about time spent, and turn hours into money with seamless invoicing.
Back in 2014, we launched a companion product to Harvest: Forecast. Our goal was simple. While Harvest provides a record of time spent, Forecast looks forward. With intuitive team planning and capacity visualizations, Forecast helps you staff upcoming projects, align schedules, and balance workloads, ensuring your team has the time to do great work.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of a new-and-improved Forecast.
Over the years, our customers have told us the impact Forecast has had on their business:
Forecast has helped us better manage our team's availability,” said Betty Chan, producer at Barrel. “We no longer have to guess or say ‘I think our developer is available.’ It allows us to look further ahead, and that enables us to better staff our team and ease workload.
I used to spend so much time each day trying to get organized," said Josh Robbins, Founder of Work RM. “But with Forecast, it takes maybe 30 minutes a day, if that. So I’m able to focus on the stuff that actually makes me money.
We’ve also heard from customers how we could make Forecast better.
Our customers need flexibility in how they plan. Many plan at different degrees of detail depending on their goals or their planning phase. At the start of the planning cycle, our customers need a way to scope project requirements across a broader period of time. This involves assessing long-term availability, updating hiring plans, and determining what projects the team can take on.
As projects kick off, teams need a way to maximize their people’s time across projects, ensuring they have the right people assigned to the right job. This involves fine tuning the hours per week dedicated to specific tasks, optimizing utilization to stay true to their deadlines while protecting against burnout.
Our re-launch of Forecast includes the introduction of new scheduling options so you can plan by week or month. Combined with an overhauled user interface and continued work behind the scenes, there’s never been a better time to try Forecast.
For a deeper dive into how Forecast provides you with a visual way to plan your team’s time, read on.
A simpler way to schedule
Scheduling your team isn’t as simple as it should be. The aim is to assign the right people for the job at hand, putting your team in the best position to deliver great work.
But knowing who is available to take on new work isn’t always obvious. It requires constant communication and meticulous schedule maintenance—otherwise, you risk scheduling conflicts and under- or over-utilizing your people.
Our customers have shared horror stories of the homemade spreadsheets they use to allocate their people’s time across projects. These documents are complex, highly manual, and provide no clear visual experience. It's no wonder that our customers commonly report devoting an entire person’s time and energy to managing them.
We wanted to create a way to schedule your team that is simple, visual, and transparent. With Forecast, you can easily click and drag assignments across a timeline and visualize your plans.
Our recent updates to Forecast allow you to plan at any scale. You can scenario plan across broader periods of time, check the monthly availability of your team, and use placeholders to determine when and where they’ll need to spend their time. This helps you make those critical business decisions regarding what projects your team can commit to, and who you may need to hire to take on more work.
It’s exceptionally helpful for assessing overall company availability across disciplines for new business opportunities in the future, in one central place,” said Dina Murphy, Director of Production at Area17. “The ability to color code new potential business vs. current project runnings vs. retainers has been exceptionally helpful when understanding what work people are booked to.”
You can also quickly build project timelines by scheduling your team by week, and then optimize their hours by day for greater utilization.
With Forecast, the choice is yours.
Maximizing impact while balancing workloads
Once projects get underway, it can be easy to lose track of your team’s capacity.
It's a balancing act.
On the one hand, you want to maximize your team's time, ensuring each person has the amount of work necessary to push projects forward, stay ahead of deadlines, and ultimately get the assigned hours they need to get paid. But on the other hand, too much work can quickly burn your team out. Your team becomes overextended, causing deadlines to slip and quality to suffer.
To thread the needle, you need an easy way to visualize your team’s workload at any moment.
Forecast was designed to provide a clear view of your team’s availability and capacity. With a color-coded heat map, Forecast highlights who on your team is overbooked (in red) and who has hours remaining to schedule (in green). You can also see the exact number of hours a person is either under or overbooked, or their capacity percentage by week or by month.
These details not only let you know which schedules you need to adjust, but also the exact number of hours you have to assign or need to reallocate.
The good news is that Forecast takes the pain out of adjusting your team’s schedules. Simply click and drag to resize assignments. You can also split assignments to break up larger chunks of work into smaller, more maneuverable pieces, or edit assignments directly for more granular control.
Keep projects on track and on budget
The profitability of your company depends on your ability to meet deadlines and keep projects on budget. No project goes exactly to plan, and when things change, it’s critical that you are able to track what has changed and the impact that has on your budget.
Forecast was built to work in tandem with Harvest. By bringing together tracked time and scheduled time, you can predict budget spend, track your remaining budget as you schedule, and compare your team’s scheduled hours to the actual time they track.
A clear view of your project’s runway
Harvest reports on your project’s progress over time. In our project summary report, you can see the progress of your project in terms of hours spent, the amount of budget remaining, your internal costs, and your uninvoiced amount.
When integrated with Forecast, Harvest will pull your project’s scheduled hours from Forecast over to your project summary report. Now, you can see exactly when your project will reach its budget based on the hours you’ve assigned.
That way, you can stay on top of your project’s budget and make adjustments if you’re at risk of going over.
Schedule with confidence
It’s important to not overextend your team’s time. Using more hours than you have available is a quick way to deplete your budget. When Forecast is integrated with Harvest, any linked project with an hourly budget will display the remaining budgeted hours alongside your team’s future scheduled hours.
This helps you determine whether you’re at risk of going over budget, or conversely, whether you have more hours available to assign so you can give those critical tasks the time they deserve.
Track progress against your plan
Forecast and Harvest work together to visualize your team’s scheduled hours vs their actual tracked time. You can see this in your project’s hours per week graph to get a high-level view of how your team has progressed against the original plan.
Use this graph to spot trends at a glance, identifying when your team has worked the expected amount of time and when they haven’t.
When things haven’t gone to plan and you need to investigate further, you can drill down into each person’s estimated vs actual hours tracked.
Who has worked more hours than expected? Who has worked less?
Seeing the estimated hours your team was assigned to work next to their actual, tracked time, allows you to identify discrepancies that might warrant a closer look. It’s possible that someone on your team was out, causing a decrease in the hours dedicated to a specific project.
It could also suggest that the project assigned didn’t require as many hours as you initially scheduled. If you see this trend manifest over time, then you’ll be able to create more accurate estimates in the future based on the actual time specific tasks take.
Try Forecast for free today
Are you ready to try a better way of planning your team’s time? Start a 30-day free trial of Forecast today and get access to easy scheduling, visualized capacity, and budget insights - all in one simple, easy-to-use tool.
