Harvest vs. UDA Construction Suite vs. WorkflowMax

Harvest is ideally suited for a variety of scenarios, particularly in the realms of freelance or consulting work, where accurate hour tracking for billing is crucial. It excels in small to medium businesses managing team projects, allowing for effective resource allocation and time management across multiple concurrent projects. For budgeting and forecasting, Harvest provides valuable data, aiding in accurately estimating the duration and cost of future projects based on past data. It's also highly beneficial for remote or distributed teams, thanks to its cloud-based platform that facilitates seamless coordination. Additionally, its detailed reporting features enhance client transparency, fostering trust through clear communication of time spent on projects. However, Harvest may be less suitable for larger enterprises with complex integration needs or specialized industries requiring more niche features. Small startups or individuals on tight budgets might find the cost challenging, especially if they don't fully utilize all its features. Lastly, for those needing only basic time tracking, simpler or free tools might be more appropriate, making Harvest an unnecessary expenditure for basic needs.

Incentivized

If you've never used software before and have low expectations, then you might be able to make it work out.

WorkflowMax is very well suited for a business that wants to track time billed by project, to have an easy way to generate invoices for those projects, and to keep track of overall productivity and invoice status. I imagine it can also be adapted to different types of businesses that deal in goods rather than services and time. I am not sure for which scenarios or businesses the program is not appropriate.

Incentivized

• Offers several options on using the tool, for example, you can use the app on your phone, the app for desktop, or simply have the website open.
• The timer integrates with other platforms. For example, our team uses Asana as our project management tool. Now, in real-time, I can know which projects my team is working on and whether we're implementing good time management strategies to meet our goals.
• The summary break downs are wonderful! You can view an individual's hours as well as project hours. There are even notifications you could receive when your team is getting close to reaching the allotted time for a client's project.

Incentivized

• The beautiful user interface. It looks good.
• Their videos are professional.
• They have webinars.

• You can customize the notifications and this has helped us enormously to schedule dates that we overlooked. Also the templates are customizable which gives the company its own branding on its reports.
• It is integrated with the Xero platform which makes it very useful to streamline the processes of billing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, petty cash flow and all the accounting and administrative area.
• It also has a very complete mobile version, where we can be present and monitor the progress of projects in real time, no matter where we are.

Incentivized

• I’m still trying to figure out how tasks best associate to a specific project. There’s a couple different places to edit that and I’m a little confused as to best practice.
• Does not integrate into basecamp which is our project management system

Incentivized

• Their spell checker creates a squiggly line to tell you that you have a misspelled word, but, doesn't allow you to correct it.
• The spell checker lets you add custom words to a dictionary, but, it can only use one dictionary at a time to check spelling. So the default dictionary gets used, and your custom words still show up as being spelled wrong!
• You can't select-copy addresses, in order to paste them somewhere else.
• Using duplexing on my printer doesn't work right. It works for every other software I own, but not in UDA.
• There is a bug in the WIP date range that doesn't pull accurate data.
• "Options" in the estimate show only cost, not margin. So if you show your customer that report, you are revealing cost info, not selling price!!
• You can't import a PDF into bid notes, even though the premise of UDA is to try to make it a single repository for all your information.
• You can't use the arrow key to browse photos in UDA. You need to close, and click into the next one. No inuitive functionality.
• The estimating module separates material and labor, in ways that create a very confusing Scope of Work. You need to select the labor item from your database, then separately select the material from your database. You end up with two line items in your Scope of Work for the same thing. Instead of writing, "Supply and Install a new window" you have "Supply a new window" and then "Install a new window." It's hard for my estimator, and confusing for my client.
• UDA will WREAK HAVOC on your contacts in Outlook.
• It does a terrible job of managing husband/wife or partner/partner situations. You can't mail merge them properly, or, you get forced into combining their contact into into a single contact-- and then how do you know whether the cell phone is his or hers???
• There is no good way to credit design fees against the construction contract, if you happen to use that paradigm for your contracts.
• There is no way to filter contracts by their date created. So, how do you find your newest contacts for entering them into something such as Constant Contact?
• If you try to use integration of QuickBooks(QB) and UDA, your ITEMS list in QB will either get expanded to hundreds or even THOUSANDS of items... or, your POs in QB will get created in a summary form such that they are virtually meaningless.
• The "lead funnel" graphic may look cool, but there is not a good way to actually report on the lead status, track the activities and calls that you make, note significant emails that you write, or keep track of when you send out thank-you cards or spiffs/gifts!
• They might tell you that these things work, but, after spending MONTHS with UDA, I found out that these problems are deal breakers.
• Within their customer service department, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. They do not use a structure such as Zendesk that so many other great companies use. Even though I was paying for priority support, there were often days going by where I could not get a call or email back to assist me with a support request or provide a tutorial on how to do something. Had I not paid extra for support, this would be acceptable. But when paying for "TotalCare" priority support, there are times when the software had me stuck, and I was stuck for a day at a time waiting for an answer. Sometimes no answer ever arrived.

• Currently the timesheet function allows staff to input time for overlapping periods which can cause some headaches when it comes to payroll and invoicing. We understand this is being addressed.
• The amount of flexibility in the product can create some challenges when setting up the jobs database at the onset. It is a daunting challenge but worthwhile when completed correctly and rolled out across the firm. Adding new jobs is much easier.
• No search function to find a specific job, you have to scroll through all jobs allocated to you.

Incentivized

Because we can't imagine being without it!

Incentivized

Again, just a minor compatibility issues using with other platforms such as Basecamp, but it does do everything promised. The only downfall we have found is having to create a job in both platforms and then connecting them later vs being able to create a project once and having them automatically connect.

Incentivized

It's easy to use and provides me with instant online access to the management of my business whether I am at my desk or overseas

Incentivized

They're very responsive and do their best to answer whatever questions we've had. Sometimes, the question or request we've made is for a feature that doesn't yet exist, however in most cases those features have been built later and did eventually address our need.

Incentivized

The support team are excellent. The only downside is that you can't phone them!

Incentivized

Decide how to breakdown your ongoing jobs - are they monthly recurring or annual broken into chunks? What are you going to give clients i.e. how will your proposals and invoices look?

Incentivized

Harvest is significantly better than Jira. I think Jira's is not originally intended to be used as a time logging/management system, but we had been previously using it as that. It was much clunkier, and many employees had a difficult time using it as a user interface goes. Harvest is much more user friendly and has simplified the daily time-logging process for everyone in our office

Incentivized

QuickBooks has great quality assurance and while they don't provide support, their software is nearly flawless. Co-construct provides great support and solves problems. In comparison, UDA Construction Suite is full of flaws, and their customer service department is disorganized and overworked.

WorkflowMax is much much easier than Streamtime, much more affordable and easier to try out and see if it meets your needs. Streamtime is a great comprehensive product but we lost a year's subscription in investment because we couldn't get answers to the support questions we needed and they had a no refund policy!

Incentivized

• Harvest has improved our payment schedules. Since we switched, we get paid for projects much sooner.
• Harvest has saved us a ton of time with payroll. We are able to track our users time and pay them appropriately based on their billable hours.
• Harvest is becoming a lifesaver around tax time. The reporting features have allowed us to pull reports for our tax accountant.

Incentivized

• All my money was wasted. I could not get a refund.
• All my time was wasted. I spent much time on customer support, and even more time "stuck" where customer support could not be reached.
• My staff time was wasted, because it was hard for them to implement and then we ultimately abandoned it.

• Max enables Loan Assistant to invoice very quickly and easily and integration with Xero for card payments brings our cashflow forward.
• Max enables the Loan Assistant team to manage their workflow in an efficient and productive way. The team all work from home. It is the centre of our Loan Assistant universe.

Incentivized