Forecast

About Forecast

Forecast organizes your team’s schedule into visual plans that let you map out your
upcoming projects and make smarter resourcing decisions. Forecast's color-coded visual plans make it easy to see how long a project is scheduled to take, who's working on what, and who's overbooked.

Forecast makes it easy to assign people to projects and then view your plans either by project or by people. Red bars indicate when an employee is overbooked, so you can move projects and deadlines around before they become burnt out. It's also easy to see when someone has availability to take on a new project and exactly how much time they can devote to it. Share your plans with the entire team so everyone knows what they should be working on, and when.

Integrate Forecast with its sister app Harvest to gain insight into project progress and improve your estimating and scheduling. The integration brings the hours you've scheduled in Forecast into Harvest, so you can see exactly when a project will go over budget. Plus you can compare the time you scheduled for someone in Forecast with the time they actually tracked in Harvest, letting you pinpoint potential problem areas.

Pricing starting from:

$5.00/month

  • Free Version
  • Free Trial
  • Subscription

Key benefits of Forecast

  • Map out project plans in Forecast so you can see exactly how long a project is going to take and who's available to work on it.

  • Make smarter resourcing decisions with the help of Forecast's color-coded capacity graphs. See who has availability to take on new work and who's overbooked.

  • Keep projects on track with the Harvest integration. See when a project is projected to go over budget so you can make adjustments or talk to your client.

  • Pinpoint problem areas with a report that allows you to see where the actual work your team is doing deviates from what you anticipated.

  • Improve your estimates on future projects by seeing exactly where your schedule was off.
  • Typical Customers

    • Freelancers
    • Small Businesses (2-50)
    • Mid-size Companies (51-500)
    • Large enterprises (500 and more)

    Deployment

    • Cloud-based
    • On-premise

    Markets

    Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France and 16 others

    Supported Languages

    English

    Pricing starting from:

    $5.00/month

    • Free Version
    • Free Trial
    • Subscription

    Images

    Forecast Software - View the capacity of all your team members and see what projects they're working on.
    Forecast Software - Map out your projects and assign people to them.
    Forecast Software - Connect Forecast with Harvest to see when your projects will go over budget.
    View 4 more
    Forecast video
    Forecast Software - View the capacity of all your team members and see what projects they're working on.
    Forecast Software - Map out your projects and assign people to them.
    Forecast Software - Connect Forecast with Harvest to see when your projects will go over budget.

    Features

    Total features of Forecast: 19

    • Access Controls/Permissions
    • Availability Management
    • Capacity Management
    • Collaboration Tools
    • Data Import/Export
    • Drag & Drop
    • Employee Management
    • Employee Scheduling Software
    • Forecasting
    • Gantt/Timeline View
    • Group Scheduling
    • Online Booking
    • Project Management Software
    • Project Planning Software
    • Projections
    • Resource Scheduling
    • Search/Filter
    • Task Management Software
    • Utilization Reporting

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    Reviews

    Overall rating

    4.1 /5
    (25)
    Value for Money
    3.7/5
    Features
    4.0/5
    Ease of Use
    4.1/5
    Customer Support Software
    4.1/5

    Already have Forecast?

    Software buyers need your help! Product reviews help the rest of us make great decisions.

    Showing 5 reviews of 25
    Flavio
    Overall rating
    • Industry: Design
    • Company size: 2–10 Employees
    • Used Weekly for 1+ year
    • Review Source

    Overall rating

    • Ease of Use
    • Likelihood to recommend 7.0 /10

    Bird's Eye View for Project Planning

    Reviewed on 25/09/2019

    Forecast is a great little tool for project managers and directors, allowing them to organise and...

    Forecast is a great little tool for project managers and directors, allowing them to organise and get an overview of upcoming tasks and projects for different teams as well as individual employees.

    Pros

    Forecast was probably the best innovation from Harvest in recent years. Even though the parent tool is in dire need of a refresh, Forecast gives managers a bird's eye view of their upcoming projects, allowing them to individually assign tasks and distribute the workload.

    Cons

    Despite the fact that it is a great forecasting tool, project visualisation can get a bit overwhelming on larger organisations with bigger teams.

    Reka
    Overall rating
    • Industry: Information Technology & Services
    • Company size: 11–50 Employees
    • Used Daily for 1-5 months
    • Review Source

    Overall rating

    • Ease of Use
    • Customer Support Software
    • Likelihood to recommend 9.0 /10

    If You Liked Harvest, You'll Love Forecase

    Reviewed on 22/09/2023

    Pros

    Super easy to use, the calendar feature is very straightforward and visually clear. Harvest had some bugs where their "scheduling assistant" feature often did not work, but I find that Forecast specializes in that feature. Keeping track of time and finding time to work with coworkers are extremely simple with Forecast.

    Cons

    If you are switching from Harvest, you do need to individually carryover all features one by one, which may be tedious. If you do not have a specific project you are working on but are working on internal projects or are helping a coworker with their project, it may be hard to track time because you need a preset "task" in order to track time. I'd recommended having a general "internal" task to track time for work that does not relate to an existing project.

    Peter
    Overall rating
    • Industry: Computer Software
    • Company size: 2–10 Employees
    • Used Daily for 2+ years
    • Review Source

    Overall rating

    • Value for Money
    • Ease of Use
    • Likelihood to recommend 7.0 /10

    A good (almost brilliant) project management SaaS tool

    Reviewed on 16/10/2018

    We use Asana and Forecast to manage time allocation to tasks, and use Forecast to plan out our...

    We use Asana and Forecast to manage time allocation to tasks, and use Forecast to plan out our resource allocation.

    Harvest Forecast seem to work well for us when planning work schedules over the next few weeks, but we do not seem to successfully use this for longer term project management. We use Harvest Forecast daily - it has become mission critical to the successful running of our business.
    However we resort to spreadsheets (and Asana) to manage longer term forecasts, and for this have marked it down a star. I suspect that this is not the fault of the software per se, but our work flow process from Asana making this just too clumsy.

    Still, Harvest Forecast a good, stable, well written piece of software. It is reasonably priced and one of the best methods to properly forecast project-based work.

    Pros

    Forecast is easy to use and does the job as a forecast management tool for us. The ease of use should not be underestimated - we have trialed many other project management tools and they were just too hard to set up.

    Moreover the integration to our Harvest itself (a time tracker) makes this much more powerful than a classic project management tool.

    We use it to manage our software development processes, which has a mix of short 1-2 days tasks and longer multi-month projects.

    Forecast and has some neat features: particularly like the quick way of setting up milestones.

    Forecast now also allows time planning around weekends so you can accommodate over time and will work in countries where the weekend is not Saturday and Sunday.

    Cons

    The integration method to Harvest Forecast is lumpy. You have to manually select which products in Forecast you import, and it is not perfectly linked, so change a name in, say, Asana and you have to manually fill this in.

    It is hard to include public holidays.

    Morgan
    Overall rating
    • Industry: Marketing & Advertising
    • Company size: 51–200 Employees
    • Used Daily for 1+ year
    • Review Source

    Overall rating

    • Ease of Use
    • Likelihood to recommend 8.0 /10

    Intuitive Time Planning Software That Adapts to Any Team Size

    Reviewed on 06/05/2019

    The software works like a dream if your organization has the depth of project management/trafficking...

    The software works like a dream if your organization has the depth of project management/trafficking skill to understand how to balance its functions with the needs of the people captured by the system. This is NOT a great software for agile environments in my opinion.

    Pros

    Forecast (and its partner Harvest) make for a powerful program that can assist in planning any work that requires team effort. The process is easy, the interface readily understandable. Setup is very simple and new projects are easily managed in Forecast. You can be as detailed as you'd like, or very high-level. Perfect for traffic management, not so great for creativity.

    Cons

    This isn't a software for agile environments, and it's VERY easy for project managers to get caught in the objective of making red into green (a person is over budgeted time allotments versus a person has time to do the work) rather than thinking about what they're actually splitting or assigning. This can be a big problem in creative environments where team members may need large chunks of time for thinking, creating, or researching.

    Jack
    Overall rating
    • Industry: Computer Software
    • Company size: 11–50 Employees
    • Used Daily for 1+ year
    • Review Source

    Overall rating

    • Ease of Use
    • Likelihood to recommend 6.0 /10

    Useful tool for planning team members' time but not the most intuitive

    Reviewed on 17/01/2019

    Overall, Forecast is a time saver for managing teams, and the feedback from the team members is...

    Overall, Forecast is a time saver for managing teams, and the feedback from the team members is that it helps co-ordinate their week ahead and know what they need to be working on. If they can work on improving the design and layout, it could be the perfect team management system.

    Pros

    Forecast's direct integration with Harvest (time tracking) makes it a simple and easy process to assign tasks to a team member in Forecast and have it automatically appear in Harvest for them to log time against, helping streamline the process and reducing the number of steps.

    Cons

    While the interface for Forecast is fairly easy to use, it isn't all that intuitive. It can be difficult to see what a team member is working on, and if there's a few people on the team, there is a lot of faffing around to open up each team member's list and see what they're assigned to.

    Showing 5 reviews of 25 Read all reviews

    Forecast FAQs

    Below are some frequently asked questions for Forecast.

    Forecast offers the following pricing plans:

    • Starting from: $5.00/month
    • Pricing model: Subscription
    • Free Trial: Available

    $5.00/user/month

    Forecast has the following typical customers:

    2–10, 11–50, 51–200, 201–500

    Forecast supports the following languages:

    English

    Forecast supports the following devices:

    Forecast integrates with the following applications:

    Harvest

    Forecast offers the following support options:

    Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base Software, Phone Support, Chat

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