Float reviews

Float's user interface and logic are inspirational. They have made the activity of coordinating multiple resources on multiple projects about as easy as it can be. They have paid a lot of attention to usability, efficient use of screen real estate and simple navigation. However the killer feature is the intuitive yet clever way that searching and data navigation work. All searching and filtering is done using a single search field, which offers indexed word search on pretty much everything including tags. There is also a well-worked out protocol for handling union and intersect searches.

The only real bugbear is that any user that can enter data into the system can define new values for any field. It isn't possible to centrally control lists such as task names, clients, job descriptions etc. This means that if you have more than one person using the system, very quickly you get different versions of the same thing being defined (e.g. job roles being slightly different) which makes it difficult to analyse across records. Not a dealbreaker, but I do think it should be possible to lock down lists of values. Also it would be good if you could zoom out the view a little more - if you're dealing with more than a dozen resources/projects.

The interface has a great overview. Adding projects and tasks is intuitive and the colours make every tasks and project stand out. Logging time is really easy. We were not interested in a "log-per-minute" type of application but rather one where you can just log bigger blocks. Float helped us plan and log our time better.

Planning a project is not super extensive. Float has some tools but the tools are a bit limited. The time tracking feature is the feature we use the most, it is a shame that is not available separately.

It is the simplest to use, extremely well organised and allows for really effective time management between the creative, editorial and customer service teams.

At times, it tends to take too long to find available tasks.

There aren't may softwares that let you schedule a team in such an easy and organised way.
I think most softwares nowadays are too complex and make you spend more time organising tasks than actually working on them.
Float is so clear and simple you can actually use it to manage big projects without spending too much time on it.

It's getting better, but it would be very useful if we could:

- Right click on a pencil and be able to copy it over into a different person.
- Book more than one person on the same project (for example if two workers are on the same project because one of them is doing a training but you don't want to charge twice for that time).
- Lately when I try to schedule more than 1 project in one day on the same person I get a message saying I can't schedule anyone for more than 24 hours) even if I'm not exceeding the 8 normal working hours. It'd be great if that could be fixed.
- It'd be good if milestones were more visible.
- I think reports should be a bit less complicated and more visual.
- It'd be really helpful if you could group projects up in folders when you go to the Projects tab as at the moment we have like... 45 different projects going on and although we color code them it's difficult to organise all of them.
-I'd like to have more than only three types of view when looking at our schedules a part from 'Days, 'Weeks' and 'Months'.
It'd be great if you could 'Archive' users as well as projects. So when a worker it's not working at the company anymore and you don't want to pay for it on Float you can kind of 'Archive' him (so you are not able to book him on anything but still you can see him on the boards so you don't loose what it's been scheduled on him.)

How easy it is to use. It's easy to jump in and also complicated enough that you can really use some advanced features.

There are of course small issues here and there but none worth mentioning at all. It's truly a great product and really helpful.

One dashboard, one overview of all resources and it integrates with our job creation tool which makes it super easy for timesheets. Moving jobs to other days is just a drag and drop away.

It would be awesome, if a job doesn't exist in our job management tool, if float could create it via push.

It's a good software for scheduling people's time on projects, seeing at a glance who is available and when, and who is working on each project. We can easily categorise people into teams, roles etc and then do quick searches. It's also really easy for every employee to log their time spent on projects so that we know what to invoice to clients.

It's not great for managing the budget of a project: the reports are really limited so you have to do a csv export if you want to do in depth analysis.

I like that you can split bookings and set different hours on different dates, rather than blanket booking a full resource.

I dislike that you must click more than 2 times to add a new project. It's an extra step that I find a bit more cumbersome than other project tools.

The presentation of all the features makes use of the software easy for technical and non-technical users alike. That reduces time spent in training users.

I guess the need to log in is a very mild pain point, but a necessary one.

Time tracking feature is mostly used by me

Right now, nothing at the moment. I like the simplicity of it.

The ease of use as a one stop shop, browser based to allow all the development team (and subsiduary but linked teams) to see important dates like dev complete, bug fix windows, cert windows and release dates.

The ability to quickly block out time for features and projects.
The ability to add notes and details to tasks.
Fully fleshed out holiday and time off structure.
Robust financial reports possible with very high degree of accuracy for budget per project, per quarter, per annum.

We used to get by with using Excel, we invested in Float and it has taken the companies' project planning to the next step. I would recommend Float for small to mid sized companies definitely, it is a great product boost and good way of reporting and seeing issues early.

it does not allow you to easily move a bunch of small tasks along in the timeline, that's my only main gripe, you can't band box select you have to shift select. Everything else is intuitive and easy.

The simplicity and immediacy of the timeline interface is massively important for digesting and understanding an often hectic and clogged schedule. Customisation of clients, projects and tasks means that we can see, at a glance, exactly what clients and projects we are working with - it takes a lot of the project management stress out of the process for teams like mine, who need to focus on their own tasks at hand.

I think there could be more options to input information within the tasks in a schedule - although there is a notes section, it would be great to see more integration with other platforms like the Google suite (Drive, slides, docs) that could streamline our process even more.

The bird's eye feature is a must, it allows for full visibility of the whole team, or segments of it, and allows managers to keep track of current, past, and upcoming projects.

Time report integration, we use Harvest and we have to use a different partner for this.

As a busy audio and visuals studio the biggest advantage we have seen with using Float is the scheduling feature. This allows us to schedule when projects and tasks need to take place, and who is working on and responsible for each project and task. As we have a number of people on our team and often numerous projects on the go at one time, Float has allowed us to better coordinate everything and has become vital in ensuring that projects and tasks are completed on time by each individual team member. As a team we can view the overall workload and time frames involved, while as an individual you can keep track of what tasks or projects you are working on and what projects you can or can not take on due to scheduling.

Sometimes the administrator /account owner has certain scheduling permissions and can add projects for individual team members int he scheduling feature. This is great but when these scheduled tasks or projects need to be changed or reshuffled it can only be done by the admin person / account owner and not the individual. There have been times when the admin person has not been available and I have needed to change the scheduled projects created by the admin person but have not been able to and have had to wait for the admin person to do it. This is the only downside so far that I have experienced using Float.

I like the ease of use for bandwidth calculation. Before Float, it would be very difficult for us to understand Trainer occupancy, and it was also a challenge to schedule trainings far in advance over several regions. With Float, I can see what's coming up at a glance and provide accurate reports to stakeholders so that they know how busy we are and will be. At the end of the quarter, I can easily calculate and show how much time we spent, and on what.

For my specific use, access can be a challenge. I need something between "Project Manager" and "Member." For me, it would be ideal if there are a "Department Manager" role where people who had this level of access could modify the schedule for anyone in their department, but not see or edit the schedule of other departments.

The simplicity of Float was what sold it for us. As a company with around 90 very busy engineers and designers, entering workload data needed to take less than 5 minutes. With Float we can do this. Once all the data is in Float, managers can easily see who needs more work and who is overloaded. Support is also fantastic. The instant message service on the website always gets a fast response.

No major issues. If I had to nitpick, I had to create a workaround to allow all employees to be able to automatically see every project in the system sithout assigning it to them. To do this I had to make every user an admin. But this works fine.

Easy to use. We can view the schedule of the entire team in one screen and make instant changes if necessary.

When creating tasks, the difference between creating projects and clients can be annoying. Also: provide more colours! ;-)

* Provides an overview of scheduled work and staff availability for forecasting and scheduling
* Ability to assign consultants to specific projects, while also assigning individual tasks.
* Minimal duplication of work as the system maintains the lifetime of the projects
* Ability to link to Jira tasks
* Easy to schedule timeframes
* Can view based on teams or individuals

Not a lot we didn't like, but it would be great to have;
* Task breakdowns
* Two way Jira linking (Currently only from Jira)
* Pull more data from Jira (Timeframes etc)

How easy it is. To book resource or edit time range you only need a few clicks or drag and drop.

It will be nice to get notifications about not booked time of some resource and small tool for moving all booked resources for a given project in time.

Kudos to you guys! I love the newer faster Float! You are making my job much easier & faster. Love the faster navigating/scrolling and the changing of a task’s time by scrolling on the schedule up or down beats the hell out of having to open the task and do it from there.
Love the new feature that you can hover over the work task and the notes appear without having to open the task.

Great job, keep it up!

Would like to be able to move a task to the afternoon (or lower in the cell) for a day where it is not a full days worth of hours and there is nothing else for that employee that day. Example, I have a technician on a 4 hour training course and it is in the afternoon. He has nothing else scheduled that day but I can't move the task lower in the cell so it looks like it is scheduled for the morning. It would be nice if you could hover over the "Time off" cells and see the notes associated with it , like you can for a work task, without having to open the "time off" cell.

Easy to setup and use without any training required. Clean interface that makes it easy to view and update resources assigned to projects. Love the ability to easily drag to extend duration of tasks assigned.

Would be great if there was a better integration with our timesheet tool (Xero) to populate timesheets automatically based on plan in Float.

I needed a program that tracked resource allocation only, and this is it. I have brought it to every company I have worked at. It is so easy to use and set up and the Asana integration is so valuable. I am able to project the workload for the next quarter in under 30 mins.

Would love to be able to prioritize tasks according to importance in the stack but otherwise, no major cons.

With Float, I love that you can make instant decisions on capacity management. I can assign someone a scheduled task and easily move the task back and forth between two team members if needed. It's a great visual tool to see how long people are spending in a certain area and to help plan ahead for the future. It gives a full visual picture of capacity and resource management, which can be hard to do. I love that you're able to assign color coding and different notes to each project, so you can monitor the health of the project properly and understand how many people are actually touching it.

Sometimes, there are some small glitches that happen, where you make an update and it either disappears or adds additional time to someone's schedule (making them fully at capacity). There aren't many cons to this application other than that because sometimes it can just take a lot of refreshing and some rework because sometimes the refreshes can cause a loss in information inputted.

Float is an incredibly intuitive piece of software to use, with a simple calendar-like interface that everyone can understand. I have found that this aspect of the software is helpful in promoting its adoption within our teams. The experience is consistent across the product, which has allowed me to discover more and more features in and enrich the experience of using the product.

The performance of the software is occasionally a bit lacklustre. For example, I often find myself accidentally clicking somewhere on the screen which prompts a dialogue box to open to enter a new task. This problem is especially pronounced when using a trackpad, and isn’t something that I experience elsewhere. Additionally, the interface seems to have a strange way of ‘splitting’ tasks that occur across multiple days. I have found that it often leaves blank gaps that give the illusion that a team member is working more hours per day than they actually are.

There are a few features that I would like to see when going forward. Firstly, I think it would be good if there were different options when ‘resizing’ a task. Currently, the task can be resized independently across both axes (i.e. how many hours per day, and across how many days). I think it would be good if there were an option for these to affect each other – i.e. the total number of hours allocated to the project remains the same and could be allocated fewer hours across more days, or more hours across fewer days.

- Easy of use
- Performance
- Interface
- Good visibility into my resources and their load

- There were couple glitches and numerous updates in January but that is resolved now
- Previously performance was not great, but there are great improvements recently on that part
- Adding holidays could be easier
- When grouped by project I'd like Float to show all assigned project for people, not only specified project