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Keep your reader recommendations coming. It is reader feedback that led me to Intervals, a truly superior solution for project management and client invoicing within one integrated web-based application. If you’ve read this blog in the past, you will be well familiar with how much I love Harvest, appreciate Basecamp, and loathe eProject/Daptiv. Enter Intervals, the killer app.

Time Tracking, Tasks & Invoicing

Intervals is both a project management and invoicing system. Its conception of the word "task" is more a part of project management than invoicing. Compared with Harvest, a pure invoicing system which views a "task" as something you charge for, Intervals requires a lot more work to get out an invoice.

Intervals forces you to plan ahead to create tasks in advance, or else feels like dual entry (task and time) when you go to enter time towards an invoice. Annoying when you are spontaneously deciding on tasks to do and just want to quickly enter the time, the way Harvest works quite well.

In Intervals you can track billable time within a “general time” bucket that includes no task, but that can be confusing if you are jumping between activities and want to detail them on the final invoice. I prefer Harvest’s quick and easy way to create new tasks and track time against them at once, rather than as two separate steps.

Within Intervals, you can just click an icon to start tracking time on the very next screen after creating the task, but at that point there will be no access to the "work type" drop-down list, unlike when you select the button “add time to this task” after creating the task or start the time recording on the "Time" tab. And then after you stop the timer and want to actually "apply" the time to the task, it is necessary to then enter the worktype info in another dialogue box, so basically it is the same as using the button in the beginning and having to complete two screens.

In Harvest less is entered when creating the task and the click of an icon button applies that first set of entries to populate all the data that will later be invoiced. That approach is much more streamlined, involving only half the data entry for each task, which really adds up.

I like that Intervals includes due dates on tasks by default, which Harvest doesn’t, since it isn’t thinking of a task as a “to do” so much as a billable unit of time. Instead of having it be so easy to create new tasks and log time against them as in Harvest, one is more prone to have fewer tasks and then keep returning to them in order to log time against them over several days. It isn’t that you can’t use Harvest in just as “organized” a way as Intervals. It's just that it is so easy to be sloppier in Harvest that there is a greater likelihood you will be.

In Intervals time tracking is a part of project management, and invoicing is an outgrowth of the fact that you already logged the time against a project. In Harvest time tracking is done solely for the sake of invoicing. If all you need is well organized, super quick and easy invoicing, Harvest is your solution.

Project Management Evaluation

Just as Intervals can be compared to Harvest when it comes to time tracking and invoicing, it can be compared to Basecamp when it comes to project management. Basecamp also includes time tracking features, but since they don't extend to include invoicing, it is an incomplete solution, requiring the addition of another app like Harvest to complete the job.

Project management is the one area in which I thought Intervals might not outshine the competition. User interface preferences vary a great deal from person to person, as do business processes from company to company. I recognize others may have a very different view of this, but when I compared the Basecamp and Intervals user experiences, again I wound up solidly preferring Intervals. The user interface is more intuitive, easier to read, and easier to navigate. There are also a number of pre-made reports that can be quite helpful.

Like Basecamp, the Intervals project management approach is more about organizing communication around tasks that have been done or need to be done by different people. It is less Gantt oriented than a software like eProject/Daptiv, which seeks to imitate MS Project within a SaaS app. I don't mind losing the Gantt view, but the one thing I couldn’t find in Intervals that I did want was a way to make one milestone/task’s start dependent on another’s completion. When one task gets pushed back, this affects all subsequent tasks, but how do you show this in Intervals without having to manually edit all subsequent tasks/milestones that should be dependent? The answer is found within their user forum:

“We used to use Microsoft Project heavily for all of our projects and we found that we spent too much time tending to and tuning the schedule. Intervals deliberately does not have task dependencies the way traditional project management solutions work. Via trial and error we found that Gantt charts are great at scheduling and articulating the steps to build something, but aren't that useful managing the day to day tasks of getting the work done. Intervals is very strong on the task tracking and getting things done side, but weak on the scheduling side. The milestones and light scheduling piece we [have implemented] strengthen the scheduling side quite a bit. You [can] create a milestone, attach tasks to it, and manage the tasks and milestones via a calendar view. You [can] drag and drop and move tasks and milestones around. It is definitely not traditional task dependencies, but it is a different way to approach the issue.”

The other major feature of traditional PM where Intervals takes a different road is resource allocation. To quote their user forum once more: “Intervals does not feature traditional resource allocation. We are working on a periscope report that will show how much work has been assigned vs. how much is done, but it is different than the resource allocation found in traditional project management (no resource leveling for example). It is meant to answer the question of "how much work do we have on the books" and can be filtered by client, person, project, etc. It may or may not do the trick depending on your needs.”

Like Basecamp, Intervals is taking a non-Gantt approach to project management. I find that the calendar editing function within Intervals is easy enough to use to make it pretty easy to manually move dependent tasks when you want, and at least with Intervals I can pick any timeframe I want to see in calendar view (unlike Basecamp).

To sum it up, as one of Interval’s customer testimonials proclaims: “At the end of the day, the core platform of Basecamp™ did not focus on time, work flow and reporting, which is where Intervals excels.” Amen.

The Costs

Pricing of Intervals is done by the number of projects, whereas in Harvest it is done by the number of users. With Intervals, for only $20 per month I get up to 15 projects with unlimited users (both staff and client users). In Harvest I get unlimited projects, but am on a plan that allows for only 1 user and pay $12 per month. Of course, since Harvest isn’t a project management app, you may not need more than one person to be able to log in, just whoever generates invoices. Still, the Harvest price point jumps from $12 for 1 user to $40 for 5, so if you do need more than one person entering their time in the app, you're going to pay for it. You can’t pay the same $20 as for Intervals and get 2.5 users, and this is just the time tracking and invoicing feature set we're talking about.

Basecamp's pricing for a plan that includes time tracking on each project, but no client invoicing, is $49/month for unlimited users and 35 projects. So combining Basecamp with Harvest would cost $61/month, and get you project management, time tracking related to projects that can be exported into the invoicing app, invoicing, a 35 project limited, unlimited PM users, 1 invoicing user, plus 10GB of document storage.

With Intervals, for a third that price I get the features of both Basecamp and Harvest within one integrated package, and the whole is indeed greater than the sum of the parts. At that price, I do get fewer projects and less document storage - 15 projects, 1 GB storage - but there are still unlimited users, so clients can be invited to contribute to mark tasks as done and view project progress. For my company, 15 projects is sufficient, since you can activate and deactivate projects at will, and we are never working on more than 15 projects at once. It would be nice to have more native storage which would obsolesce our use of ftp to share files during data migrations, but it's not a deal breaker.

Needless to say, I will be canceling my Basecamp and Harvest subscriptions at the end of the next billing period, and making the switch to Intervals. Try Intervals out for 30 days yourself to see if it is an approach that will work for your business.

(Special Nice-To-Have: Intervals creates a permalink page for each task, so that contributors can conveniently be directed to that specific task page.)

Labels: Project_Management, Recommended_Apps, SaaS