I love, love, love Harvest. As a solo shop, Harvest is a $12/month investment which feels like a $400/month return.

One workflow aspect I’d love Harvest to solve for me is time forecasting. Here’s how I currently keep track of my commitments in iCal:

These details are a pain to keep updated, and rarely accurate. I’d love for Harvest to feed this data into my calendar automatically — project name, allocated hours for the week, actual hours to date.

Fortunately, Harvest has a secondary application called Forecast for team scheduling. Unfortunately, I ran into a couple of annoyances that will probably turn out to be blockers:

• Forecast doesn’t automatically integrate with Harvest, where I’ve already identified my projects (and time budgets associated with each).
• Given I jump between projects a bit, I’d like to be able to budget my time on a weekly basis instead of an hourly basis (e.g. 8 hours/week for a given project).

I can understand the appeal of producing Forecast as a separate product, but I really think Forecasting makes most sense as a feature of Harvest.

I’ve submitted this feedback to Harvest via support ticket, but thought it would be fun to blog too!