Harvest Forecast Alternative For Resource Planning & Project Staffing
Looking for the best resource management tools to streamline your project scheduling and allocation?
Whether you're managing a small team or a fast-growing people business, choosing the right software is crucial. With a tiny team, you can get started resourcing on a whiteboard, or maybe a spreadsheet. After a while, you want a solid tool.
In this comparison, we explore two leading options: Operating and Harvest Forecast. While Harvest Forecast excels in simplicity, making it perfect for small businesses, Operating offers a robust suite of features—like skill management, CRM integration, and detailed reporting—ideal for organizations that need a scalable solution, but still want a modern and simple UX. Learn how these tools can enhance your project scheduling and staffing, while helping you manage resources more effectively.
Work Scheduling And Allocation Management
Both Operating and Harvest Forecast are designed for resource management and scheduling. You can assign people to projects, both internal and commercial projects, and see their capacity on a timeline. Harvest Forecast is great for simple scheduling and provides a limited feature set, which might work well for smaller companies. Operating builds on top of that by providing a visibility for both tentative and confirmed allocations in the same view with robust filtering options. When it comes to simply scheduling time for projects, both systems work well for the purpose.
In both tools, you can see how occupied people are with projects at any given day or week. Operating also gives a monthly view on top of the daily and weekly allocations.
Project planning timeline
Both Operating and Harvest Forecast feature a project planning timeline, where you can assign people to projects and plan how much work is still to come. Both tools let you see when people are on a leave, so you can take it into account in your planning. Operating lets you also add a project budget, making it easy to compare what you've allocated to a target you've set internally or with a client. Operating makes a distinction between tentative and confirmed projects on the timeline, so it's easy to know which projects are still in the sales phase, and which are already ongoing.
Reporting
Operating has reporting features with project portfolio reporting, capacity forecasting, planned and actual hours, as well as utilization reporting. This makes it easy for users to understand their company's current working situation. Operating also provides a REST API and possibility to export reports as a CSV file, so it's possible to build your own reporting. Harvest Forecast doesn't provide any reporting, as it's made simply for scheduling. It does provide the option to export all the allocation and project data as CSV, so you can build on top of that.
For someone looking to steer a larger operation, and looking to get visibility into the business, Operating provides many much needed reports out of the box.
CRM Integration For Planning Tentative Projects
One of the big reasons companies choose Operating as their resource allocation tool, is the possibility to connect your CRM so that deals turn into tentative projects automatically, and you can start building teams and staffing the projects without double data input. This makes it easy for the delivery teams to know what's happening in sales and provides a place for the two teams to share future opportunities, and which sorts of roles are needed. Naturally, by connecting your CRM, you'll also get a tentative allocation forecast making sure you also account for your sales pipeline in your forecasting. You can use the deal probabilities from your sales pipeline in the capacity report not to make overly optimistic estimates.
Harvest Forecast doesn't include any sort of integration to CRM systems, or views to handle the reporting.
Other integrations and REST API
Operating offers a full REST API to connect your whole tool stack. You can connect your ERP, HR system, time tracking and more with ease. On top of that Operating provides native integrations to many tools like Harvest Time Tracking, HiBoB, Pipedrive, and CV Partner. Harvest Forecast is designed to work together only with Harvest time tracking, which is understandable. Operating also provides an integration to Harvest making it easy to track time in Harvest, and schedule work in Operating.
CSV Export
Both tools offer the possibility to export people's schedules and project allocations as CSV.
Skill Management Module
Operating comes built in with a skill management module and consultants' skill profiles. You can add skills in different categories like tech skills or industry experience, and people can then add these to their skill profiles, making it easy to filter for specific skill sets when doing staffing. People can also indicate their skill level and if they excel in some skill, or would like to learn something better. This makes it easier to build balanced teams.
Harvest Forecast lets companies use tags to add skills for people. This is a great way to get going with more robust filtering of people, but managing a big skill matrix in tags might come tough once the operation scales, and the user experience for a single consultant is not as great as having your own profile page where you can show what you know.
Automatic project <> consultant matchmaking
Operating uses people's skills and availability data as a basis to make suggestions for suitable consultants to projects. When you're building teams, you can get a catered list of people who could fit the role at hand. If you'd like to dig deeper to people's schedules, you can also manually filter to find the right role. Harvest Forecast relies on manual filtering, which works, but can be time consuming when staffing froma large pools of consultants.
Project Budgets & Rate Cards
Harvest Forecast is a tool designed only for scheduling time. Operating lets you add monetary forecasting on top of that. You can add project budgets and rate cards to make sure you schedule time also in according to what's been agreed on commercially with the client. The reporting module will also give you not only a capacity forecast (how booked your company is likely to be in the future), but also a revenue forecast. This makes it possible for Operating to be the tool where you forecast your whole professional services business!
Flexible Group Structures For Larger Organizations
Operating offers the possibility to add groups and subgroups, and people can belong to multiple ones at once. This makes it easy to build your specific organizational structure to Operating, which also helps people build saved filters for just their specific team. You can then also see all the reporting either for the whole company or a specific P&L unit at once. This makes the us of the tool easy for different members of the organization. Harvest Forecast lets you tag people with e.g. the team name or unit's name, but gives no explicit hierarchy for the team. It might get tougher to handle your workforce when the operation grows beyond the first tens of consultants.
Personal Support & Enterprise Pricing Plans
Every Operating customer gets personal support in getting up and running. Our team helps with your data migration from old tools (even if it's a spreadsheet), and makes sure you get a flying start with using our tool either in in-person or remote kickoffs, or virtually via Slack or Teams. It's in our interest that you succeed. Harvest Forecast works in a self-serve model, giving you the autonomy to get going as you wish.
Harvest Forecast has one flat pricing, which is a great thing for simple use cases. Operating's pricing can be adjusted for longer periods time, and different invoicing options are available from credit card to invoicing. We're happy to be flexible depending on the size of your organization. We're in it for the long haul!
Timesheets
Operating provides a simple timesheets module where you can log time on projects and see how it compares with the project allocations to make sure you're not over- or underspending. While Harvest Forecast isn't a time tracking tool, Harvest Forecast offers an integration for Harvest, which is a great time tracking tool for small- to mid-sized agencies and consulting businesses.
Summary
Both Operating and Harvest Forecast are valuable tools for resource management and scheduling. Harvest Forecast excels in simpler, smaller-scale environments, offering straightforward scheduling and ease of use, making it ideal for small companies. However, as businesses grow and their needs become more complex, Operating provides a more comprehensive solution. It builds on the basic features of Harvest Forecast with advanced capabilities like skill management, robust reporting, automatic project-consultant matchmaking, and monetary forecasting, including project budgets and rate cards. These features make Operating particularly well-suited for larger organizations that require detailed insights, efficient resource allocation, and the ability to manage complex project portfolios and team structures. As such, while Harvest Forecast is perfect for simpler settings, Operating stands out as a powerful tool for companies that need a more robust, scalable solution as they expand.
