Harvest time tracking retainer software#

The transition to Harvest was smoother than I anticipated! The feature set makes it nice and easy to use and I was able to integrate Harvest directly into Jira. I ended up importing the last half of the year’s worth of time into Harvest to set ourselves up for making data-driven decisions in Forecast. After all, to be able to use Forecast, we would need some historical data. I had to spend some time figuring out the categories for everything and deciding how things would be migrated from Tempo. I didn’t need to do much, as the user experience for Harvest is really intuitive. In December of 2019, I dug into the Harvest app and came up with a demo for the team. So we switched over our time tracking from Jira’s plugin Tempo to Harvest at the beginning of 2020, a nice clean transition time.

Harvest time tracking retainer software#

It was going to be a big deal to switch time tracking software… could I make Tempo work with Forecast? Was it worth the effort? Why would we want to Frankenstein an integration like that anyway? We need Forecast, and it would make sense to use the software that integrates with it tightly, which is what ended up driving us to Harvest. Harvest was recommended almost unanimously. I also asked my Bureau peeps about time tracking. Based on these observations and the vote of confidence from my colleagues, it seemed to make a great deal of sense to try. The more I looked at Forecast, the more I thought OMG this looks amazing, and it does everything I want it to do. I wondered if I could make Forecast work with Tempo. I’d heard of it, and thought it looked pretty good.

On a monthly Bureau of Digital call with the group I became part of after Owner Camp last year, I asked, “What software are people using to plan and forecast for their business?” And 75-80% of people said Forecast. So, now what? Bureau of Digital to the Rescue! Well, it didn’t work any better than the first time we tried. We spent time looking at different software options to optimize our planning, and so we decided to give Tempo planner another try. Last year, we hired a Customer Success Manager to help us become operationally better. They make sense for things like billable development time, but how do you track administrative time, meeting time, or creative work that isn’t attached to an issue? When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and for Jira, everything is centered around issues. Any plugin to Jira (like Tempo), is limited by how Jira works. Unfortunately, the Tempo user experience is tied to how Jira works, and from a user experience perspective, is extremely prescriptive. We use Jira for tracking time to tickets, so we tried using Tempo Planner, the part of Jira that allows you to, in theory, schedule people. I've tried to plan “resources” with spreadsheets. I've taken a few different approaches to doing that.

However, I've wanted to be more growth-minded, planful and regimented in the future business and work we do. At TEN7, we’ve excelled at servicing our clients. But in order to grow more proactively, you need to put plans in place. When a company starts out, its growth is organic, and much of its functioning is reactionary.