Hub Planner

Ressource Management and holiday

Pros:

Holiday and resource planning + overviewing with just one click

Cons:

the initial startscreen shows up complete company and you need to choose your team to show only...

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

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.

Useful and effective software

Comments: Overall, HubPlanner helps our management team in our Change department to view how much work resources anticipate they will do and how much they have actually done. We can see any gaps in time and so allocate a person more work or a new project. While most people are working from home, HubPlanner really helps keep track of what everyone is doing when you can't actually see them doing it.

Pros:

There are a wide range of features and it is very customisable to suit our needs.

Cons:

There are some limitations as it is not 100% customisable, but these are mainly small things, for example our working hours divide to be 7.25 a day (and 7 on Fridays) but it doesn't allow us to allocate smaller than 1 hour or half an hour. Also, on a laptop screen, it doesn't have a great view. Everything is quite chunky which makes it hard to view a few people's schedules at the same time. It would be easier if the customer support team shared individual email addresses rather than a generic one for the whole team so that you can continue conversations with a specific person.

Alternatives Considered: monday.com and Smartsheet

Reasons for Switching to Hub Planner: It suited us best due to having so many different features we could make use of.