Hub Planner

Great product for a small professional services company still establishing itself

Pros:

Easy to use, cost effective, and great product overall.

Cons:

Useful for businesses who are starting up and scaling up.

Structure to our time management and leave requests

Comments: Overall, the experience has been a good one. I can't complain, honestly.

Pros:

Before this software, my company used to use an excel sheet which had to be filled in at the end of the week every week. It was very tedious and I used to forget to do it quite often. We also didn't have a formal way of requesting vacation leave and checking exactly our leave balances. We now use Hub Planner to do both of these things. Additionally, our head of department assigns tasks and there are hours allocated for each task which really helps with resourcing and balancing the workload.

Cons:

A real-time tracker would be nice. Something like a button that you click on when you start on a specific task and then click again to stop it. I would also like to have it as an app on my phone. I am not sure whether it exists already and it's something the company has not informed us about. Correcting mistakes is always difficult as well. I have to contact the administrator every time I input data in a wrong field.

It's ok, but...

Comments: It is okay, but for some cases, a workaround is needed.

Pros:

It is good, that you have a tool where you can track the time you need to work on several projects and generate reports from it. Integrating it with other tools is also a nice feature (such as invoicing tools).

Cons:

There are several small things that could be done much better, just to mention a few: - Include easy to use categories within one project, so that you can track time on task level - To make tracking time even easier include a start/stop timer function - When approving time cards for my employees and finding a mistake: In order to change the mistake, I need to deny the timecard, change the screen, go into editing mode for my employee and then edit, approve (on behalf of employee), change screen again to finally approve the timecard. Why not edit/approve the timecard directly on the approval screen for admins? - Decimal numbers of time tracking are screwed when exporting them to excel

Hub Planner review

Comments: Overall the product serve our needs for 4+ years. We have added new software in other areas as we have grown and needed better connectivity between systems than Hub Planner could provide.

Pros:

It was easy to use and track time effectively

Cons:

It needs more project and task management features; better integration with other softwares

An easy, affordable, well featured solution for time-sheeting and resource management.

Comments: We went from having one staff member dedicated full-time to resource management to having them freed up for thirty hours of the week. We suddenly had almost another head-count to help with project co-ordination, rather than just keeping the wheels turning. And timesheet compliance went up too, because it was so easy to use!

Pros:

It's affordable, extensible, good to look at, and easy to use.

Cons:

There aren't really any detractors to this one. Perhaps it's not a high-powered analysis tool, but the dashboards it does supply are quite thorough out of the box, and more than likely to meet all the needs of the vast majority of companies.

Alternatives Considered: Microsoft 365

Reasons for Choosing Hub Planner: We had been using an in-house developed custom tool, and it was erratic, unreliable, hard to use, and didn't have any features that could help us in analysing our hours easily: we had to export everything to Excel, and do most things manually.

Reasons for Switching to Hub Planner: We looked into building out a simple, but more robust, SharePoint List based system ourselves. We could have had our own features, custom developed for us. Then we looked at how many hours even the simple version of that would take, and at the Hub Planner licencing costs, and realised that we could get 10x the functionality, and it would take us more than a year to hit the same costs. And Hub Planner looked better, and would be easier for our staff to use. It was a no-brainer. We purchased our licenses a week later.