Harvest vs. Replicon Project Time Tracking

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

I believe it is well suited for a small sized company, like my previous one, that does not want any IT overhead to onboard a new tool. This tool is available online and can be accessed via the internet. It has all the necessary components to help you record your activity. But the solution in its current form is not scalable. [I've] Given few of my reasons I feel this is not well suited for a large company (like the one I currently work at).

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

• It allowed me to fill my work time sheet. Every week I had to fill this. Based on the numbers the company keeps track of which days I worked.
• It reminded me to fill the time sheets constantly and also notifies me when it gets approved. So I never really forgot to fill it.
• It allowed me to see my vacation days left, and plan ahead.
• It had a list of holiday dates which was very handy to plan my trips or vacation.
• It had categorization by department and my view of time sheets was only limited to me. I could not see others time sheets, and except for my manager, nobody else could look into mine.
• It had internet access, which meant I could fill my sheets anywhere. It came in handy while working from home where a VPN connection may not be present. I also guess that this service being online meant no extra effort from IT department side.

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

• The UI in my opinion was too simple. Calendar views were pretty stale.
• I don't believe there was a mobile app for this, or this site worked nicely when opened on small devices.
• A better view of my time could have been shown. At the time I could only see small excel like boxes filled with numbers. Graphs, or some other visualization of remaining days would have been lucrative.
• Very stupid login page. We had to fill "company name" at the login page and this name had to match exactly to what was set in the database. It was frustrating and I always had to refer my notes to get that right.
• There wasn't any preselection option which made it hard to do it fast. If I can only set a few fields (because we had long list of dropdowns to choose from) then this process could be much smoother.
• A major issue was not being able to see my team-mates schedule or calendar. E.g. when are they taking vacations. So I had to pester them offline to get this information. Many times due to inter-team miscommunication we didn't know about others vacation days during planning. A central place where I could see this information would have helped me a lot.

Incentivized

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

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

I believe it is not in my power to select the best tool. It depends on whatever company I work for. It just happens that we use a different system (and I don't even know if this is an internal system, or another online tool). But I do like my current system. It has a better UI, and more detailed insights about my time. It also shows my pay stubs and other small neat information like tax papers to help me organize. It also has notifications when something new comes up. All these features I think I lacked in Replicon (or maybe my company didn't have access to these).

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

• Replicon helped me maintain a record of my time. This helped during my assessment where my manager could see my work hours.
• Replicon was easy to use, so I didn't spend my precious time filling sheets in this site. As far as I can remember, this site only gave me problem once, but was never down.
• Though a good tool, I actually never got the use case of recording your time sheets. I think it will be pretty hard for an employee to just fill the time sheet and not show up for work. There are so many meetings and people around you, that you cannot fake your presence. So I feel there is no need to fill time sheets. It is a functionality with no real world solution.

Incentivized