Forecast is Harvest’s planning tool. It gives you one view of your team’s time and your projects’ budgets, so you can see who is available, plan work before it starts, and understand the financial impact of a plan before you commit. Because Forecast is built into Harvest, it uses the people, projects, clients, tasks, and time off you already have — there’s no separate Forecast account or sync to maintain.

What you can do with Forecast

• See who has capacity and who is overbooked, weeks or months ahead.
• Schedule work on projects and people, with tasks, hours, and repeat weekly assignments.
• Plan around approved time off, company holidays, and named placeholders for unfilled roles.
• Add milestones and planned expenses to projects.
• See estimated revenue and costs for each project as you plan.
• Compare forecasted hours, revenue, and costs with actuals in Harvest reports.

The Projects and Team views

Forecast has two views for planning, and you can switch between them at the top of the page:

• Projects shows every project on the board as a row, so you can plan a project from start to finish.
• Team shows a row for each person with a Forecast seat, so you can plan each person’s time and see their availability. Placeholder rows sit above the people, and anyone you’ve seated who doesn’t sign in to Harvest appears here too.

Both views work at the Day, Week, and Month scale. Use the scale buttons in the toolbar to change the scale, and use the arrows or the calendar picker to move through time.

Add projects to the board

The Projects view is an opt-in board. A project appears on the board after it’s added to it. If your account was migrated from the standalone Forecast app, your projects and schedule come across as part of the migration.

To add projects:

1. Open the Projects view.
2. Click Add project at the bottom of the board.
3. Select one or more projects, then click Add project.

To remove a project from the board, open the project’s Actions menu and choose Remove from planning. Removing a project hides it and its milestones from the board, but keeps its scheduled work, so adding it back restores the schedule.

Creating assignments

Draw an assignment on the board to schedule work:

• In the Projects view, draw on a project’s row and choose a person or placeholder.
• In the Team view, draw on a person’s row and choose one of their projects.

The assignment editor lets you set:

• Person or placeholder — who the work is assigned to.
• Project — chosen for you in the Projects view, or selected in the Team view.
• Task — a specific task on the project, or No task to plan at the project level.
• Dates — the start and end of the assignment.
• Hours / day (or Hours / week / Hours / month at the week or month scale) — how many hours per working day, week, or month.
• Total hours — the total across the whole assignment. The hours per period and total hours stay in sync, so you can enter whichever is more natural.
• Notes — optional details or a link.

If the assignment is no longer than a week, you can check Repeat weekly and choose the number of weeks to create a series of weekly assignments. You can edit or delete one occurrence or the whole series later.

A task-less assignment is a project-level bar. It still counts toward the project’s planned hours and financial estimates.

Placeholders

A placeholder is a named, unfilled role that you can schedule before choosing a person. Use placeholders to plan for open roles, contractors you haven’t hired yet, or work you know you’ll need but haven’t assigned.

Create placeholders in Configure > Placeholders, then schedule them like people from the Person picker in the Projects view or from their rows in the Team view. When the role is filled, change the assignment’s Person from the placeholder to the real person. Placeholders have a weekly capacity but no Harvest login, so they don’t track time.

How many placeholders you can have depends on your Forecast seats: two are included, plus one more for every four seats. At the limit, archive a placeholder to add another.

See Placeholders in Forecast for the full details.

Time off and availability

Harvest PTO shows on the board as a read-only layer, so you can plan around it — it’s still requested and approved in Harvest’s Time off pages. Forecast also has its own time off: the Time off group on the Projects view has a lane for each person plus an Everyone lane for company-wide closures, and you add and edit those on the board. Company holidays are managed from the company calendar row. The Workload and Actuals overlays on the Team view show open capacity and tracked time against planned time.

See Time off and availability in Forecast for the full details.

Milestones

Milestones are named dates on a project, such as a client presentation or a launch. Add them from a project’s row in the Projects view. See Milestones in Forecast.

Scheduling expenses

Planned expenses let you attach expected one-off costs to a project, so its forecast cost and revenue reflect committed spend as well as planned time. They are separate from the expenses your team tracks in Harvest.

Add a planned expense from a project’s forecast panel (click the project’s name, then Add expense) or from the project’s lane (hover over the lane, click +, then choose Expense). Enter a description, amount, expected date, whether it’s billable, and an optional category.

Every planned expense counts toward the project’s Est. cost. A billable planned expense also counts toward Est. revenue.

See Planned expenses in Forecast for the full details.

Forecasted revenue and costs

On the Projects view, each project row can show Est. revenue and Est. cost for the whole project, based on planned time, Harvest rates, and planned expenses. Click a project’s name to open its forecast panel, where you can see the estimates, planned hours, average cost rate, and planned expenses. The figures follow the account’s project financial estimates setting, which an administrator controls in Configure > Preferences.

See Forecasted revenue and costs for how the figures are calculated and who can see them.

Filtering and exporting

The toolbar filters focus the board on the projects, people, or time you need:

• Projects view: filter by Project, Client, Tags, and People.
• Team view: filter by Role, Department, People, and Placeholders.

Click Clear filters to remove them all. To download the schedule, click Export in the page header and choose the timeframe, time format, and whether periods are columns or rows. In the Projects view you can also include tasks. The export uses the filters currently applied and downloads as a CSV.

See Filtering and exporting your schedule for the full details.

Reporting on your forecast

Harvest reports can include Forecasted hours, Delta, Forecasted revenue, and Forecasted costs columns, so you can compare planned and actual figures.

See Reporting on your forecast for the grouping rules and permissions.

Configure Forecast

Open the Configure tab to manage:

• Seats — who is on the schedule, and the way through to buying or reducing Forecast seats under Manage subscription > Forecast seats. See Forecast permissions and Forecast billing.
• Placeholders — the named, unfilled roles you can schedule.
• Preferences — the account-wide project financial estimates switch, your personal timeline financials switch, and the weekly digest.
• Forecast migration — if your account is moving an existing Forecast schedule into Harvest.

What you can see and edit

What you can view and change in Forecast depends on your Forecast access. Seats decide whether you appear on the schedule; permissions decide what you can view and edit. Administrators and Executive Managers can set your access from your permissions, and so can anyone with the Manage all level.

See Forecast permissions for the full set of access levels and how to request access.