Using Harvest and Forecast together will allow you to see how your time has been spent, and how it’s going to be spent. They’ll show you if, and when, you’ll hit your budget, to get the full picture of your project. It’s a connection from your project’s past to its future, in one view. You can use this information to answer questions like:

• How much longer will this project take based on the current schedule?
• Will this project go over budget? If so, when and by how much?

The Project progress graph of a project shows not only how many hours you’ve used in your project, but when those hours were used. The Harvest and Forecast integration will let you know when future hours are planned to be used, as well as when you’re going to be reaching your budget. (Note: For fee-based budgets, we will graph the monetary amount based on the time tracked and time scheduled in Forecast and the configured rates.)

In this example, it looks like this project will be going over budget by the following week.

This graph allows you to get the whole story — the past, and the future, on a single axis. Not only can you see if you’re going to go over budget with the current scheduled hours in Forecast, you can see when you’re going to go over budget, so you can either talk to your client or reallocate your resources as soon as possible. For more information, see Setting up the Forecast integration.

You can use the navigation arrows in the top right corner to move forward and backward in time.

Additionally, in Forecast, the remaining budget for each project will appear in the Future Scheduled Hours drawer, so you know how much time you have to work with when scheduling.

Want to see how your expectations compare to what time was actually tracked? Click the bar graph icon in the top-right corner to get a week-by-week view of your estimates vs actuals.