Very powerful when used with Harvest
May 28, 2018

Very powerful when used with Harvest

Timothy King | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Forecast

Forecast is used company wide and is primarily driven by the project managers. This is used to manage agency projects and individual schedule to ensure that individuals are not severely under or overbooked. Forecast is used in combination with Harvest and Asana as a portion of our overall agency workflow.
  • Schedule visualization. Harvest makes it very easy to see how many hours of work are being assigned to each individual.
  • When used with Harvest it makes for a powerful tool for determining how much time was spent on projects in comparison to their estimates.
  • Data can easily be pulled to make future decisions on project estimates, as well as individual strengths and weaknesses.
  • Not as intuitive as its companion software, Harvest. This software takes longer to learn when on-boarding new staff. It is also difficult to view time notes without needing to physically open them up. This could be improved by expanding the "on hover" functionality. Personally, having spent as little time in workflow software is really important, as it gives me more time to code.
  • Because we use this software to plan schedules, items often fall through the cracks. I would like to see some more sophisticated syncing with not only Harvest but also with Asana.
  • Lack of integration with Asana. It would be nice to pull data from forecast and display it in Asana. This would be helpful for understanding how much time I have to spend on a project rather than bounce back and forth between web apps.
  • Forecast does not integrate with other software in our workflow, and it makes it an entire extra step when it doesn't necessarily need to be. This takes extra time away from my actual job.
  • Forecast is powerful when used with Harvest, and allows for powerful data-driven decisions in hiring and project estimates. The more informed we are when making decisions and scoping, the more profitable the company can be.
  • It takes some time to onboard new Employees which can take time away from a profitability or other training.
I have not used any other scheduling software other than Forecast. The company selected Forecast because it is used in conjunction with Harvest. The pair of web apps can be used to pull detailed data. This is very important to our agency, and making data-driven decisions is exceptionally important to our agency mission.
Forecast is well suited for tracking schedules, especially if it is only being controlled by a single department. When it comes to using Forecast in a larger ecosystem with more "cooks in the kitchen" it would be helpful to have the software more easily integrated with other software.