Harvest vs. UKG Workforce Central (discontinued)

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

We use Kronos Workforce Central only for it's timekeeping and scheduling/forecasting capabilities. It absolutely meets our needs for these areas. The reporting functionality also serves us well; exporting reports in excel covers the needs for most teams that use the system. Finally, business leaders and local HR crews are able to run reports on the teams they support.

Incentivized

• Consistently making updates to better serve their wide variety of users
• Allows for a decent amount of customization - you can put in different tasks for different departments, you can put in project costs on a one-time or recurring basis to compare time to money, etc.
• It's pretty easy to pull customizable reports to fit what data you want to look at.

Incentivized

• As a full service hospital there can be demands of staff to respond to high census or staffing shortages. Kronos has offered great utilization in floating hours between units and departments, identifying direct or indirect patient care hours, and ultimately offering analytics to clinical and operational leaders. This ability to specifically move hours while at work is exceptional for reporting and planning purposes across the organization.
• The self-managed and leader managed options of an employee’s time card is of huge benefit. As a 24/7 hour operation it is critical that each individual is accountable for their own timekeeping. Kronos allows each employee to manage and submit adjustment, updates, and changes while at work without having to have their manager do it for them. The proceeding approval/acceptance process with these changes is well established and easy to authenticate.
• The ability to access and navigate the user interface is very friendly and forgiving. Other systems can be quite cumbersome and hard to navigate, update, and easily change, but Kronos is pretty straight forward both for users and administrators. This ability to easily orient new team members and managers has been a great benefit to the organization.

Incentivized

• We would love to see Harvest build a feature for more detailed proposals that could be signed by the client and then automatically be turned into a billable invoice. The estimate falls short of this for larger projects.
• Sending an invoice directly to the client from the Harvest dashboard can sometimes fail. Because it's coming from a spoofed email- some clients never get the invoice because it get's trapped in their spam folder.

Incentivized

• Training required to use the product effectively, not simple at first
• Dependent on Java, frequent updates to Java necessary to continue using the Kronos platform
• Reporting tools are extensive and solid, though some reports can only be extracted in PDF, not in the more usable Excel format. How Kronos determines which can be extracted in Excel vs. PDF, I can't tell.

Incentivized

Now that the system is installed and operational, the "pain is gone"...therefore we see no reason to change to a different application. There is no functionality that is missing from the system that would drive us to consider another solution at this time. Maintenance support from Kronos is sufficient and updates occur regularly.

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

I have not actually had any customer support issues as the product just works for me and I have not needed it. So using that as the basis of making my assessment on support I would reckon the team are pretty responsive and attentive to customer needs. I have only used the solution on Chrome and Android so have no idea what the experience is like on other browsers or phone operating systems.

Incentivized

Kronos Workforce Central's support is amazing! From the support the software alone gives our department to the customer service team, we have never been more thorough as we are now. There are plenty of trainings provided and assistance is always there when you need it. The launching process was very detailed.

Incentivized

Everhour is just very rudimentary and ugly. It did the okay for time tracking and basic reports — but it wasn’t very intuitive and could’ve been a lot more elegant. You couldn’t edit other users time or make corrections it was just a data pull and that was it.

Open air is even worse. it’s like something out of 1985. Extremely ugly and not at all easy to use. It fulfilled the basic requirement of tracking time and we did not use it for anything else. When they raised the price to eight grand a year, despite our limited use of it’s functionality. We quickly dropped them.

Incentivized

We looked this product first and actually started the conversion process before we realized it could not do some essential functions we needed. One of the simple ones was allowing for employees to select to clock in or out and not just assume the direction based on their schedule or last punch. With bus drivers working multiple routes or shifts this was imperative that they be able to select this as while they may forget one punch being able to select the direction helps identify where the missing punches are. I'm hoping this has since been corrected because it absolutely floored me that such a relatively simple thing was not an option.

Incentivized

• Better tracking of time for projects = better quotes for clients! In turn, they trust us more, because we're only billing for the time used and projects completed.
• We can also have clear conversations with employees about productivity and provide feedback with real numbers that the employee has control over.

Incentivized

• Kronos is much more expensive than the previous systems we were using, so at this point the ROI is negative. The idea is that it will allow us to scale and grow the company more easily so time will tell if that is the case.

Incentivized