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 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.

Very easy to use and gives a very nice conceptual view of what employees have to do.

I really wish it would more calendar features.

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...

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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.

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.

Hi Ben, Thanks for your review! I've passed your Xero integration request to our team. I also wanted to let you know that we do have a time tracking add-on in Float that pre-fills your team's timesheets based on the work schedule. You can find out how it works here, https://www.float.com/how-it-works/time-tracking. All Float users can try time tracking free for 30 days. The Account Owner needs to activate this from the Team Settings in Float. If you want a demo of how it works, or have any questions, please feel free to email us at support@float.com. Thanks again for the review! Cheers, Siobhan

As a developer it's easy to get sidetracked. That's why we have project managers and Float. Float helps me not only keep track of what I should be doing and when I should be doing it, but it also helps me keep track of what my colleagues are doing. Especially now, when working from home is the new normal, it's really easy to check if one of my colleagues is working and if they might have some time available for me. All that without having to add 20 filters and navigate a complex UI. Float has all the features in all the right places but still manages to keep a minimal looking UI.

There are only minor annoyances I have with Float (they're more like nitpicks anyways). A filter to hide projects that aren't being worked on in the current week/month would be nice. Also, there's a lot of freedom when assigning colours to a project. Maybe some predefined colour palettes would work better and stop our our schedule from looking like a lego brick wall ;)

It is easy to see what myself and my colleagues have got scheduled to help make sure that resources are managed effectively.

There is not much integration with other applications that we use which means at the moment it is a stand alone product that we use in our business. If there was more integration then we would be able to utilise the functionality more effectively.

Hi, Thanks for your review! You can check out Floats direct integrations, including a Slack notification app, on our website here, https://www.float.com/integrations. We welcome hearing any other integration requests you have. Please email support@float.com. Cheers, Siobhan

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.

Its a user friendly tool that makes resource management and managing a team of 40 with varying skillsets, availability, and calendars feasible.

It is not customizable, few api integrations that have worked, no development hope even when communicating with brand reps. You almost are forced to use it as is, off the shelf, or not at all.

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.

Hi Nathalye, Thanks so much for your review! We don't currently have any direct integrations with other time tracking tools. We do have time tracking available as an additional feature though on Float that pre-fills your team's timesheets based on their work schedule. https://www.float.com/how-it-works/time-tracking You're welcome to try this add-on free for 30 days. An Account Owner can activate this from the Team Settings page inside Float. If you need any help or have further questions, please feel free to email us at support@float.com. Thanks again for the review! Cheers, Siobhan

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.

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.

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.

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...

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- 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

The simple usability of the software. How quick it is to add jobs, extend and move jobs around to different people. Flexible scrolling through the weeks. So easy to set someone up and get started with very minimal training. Report system very useful for monthly reports. For top line project management this is the perfect tool.

The search bar sometimes doesnt work or show particular jobs on occasion. Search seems to only work within the month you are viewing, rather then showing a job from a previous month. This is intermittent and sometimes works to find what you are looking for when refreshed. Still need to test this after the software update to see if it has been resolved. Doesn't refresh for designers, so we have updated and moved jobs around and they aren't aware as their float has remained the same, unless they manually refresh the window. Would be great to see more in depth project management potential, such as uploading briefs, designs and signing them off all on this software.

Easy to use and it's simple to scroll backwards to check your historical or upcoming bookings. As a user it does all I need it to do.

I've previously used Synergist which was great for production resources as all the bookings automatically pre-populated timesheets ready to add hours and submit. I'm not sure if Float has this functionality but our organisation uses separate systems for both, and I find it does add a little more effort to time logging.

Hi Mel, Thanks so much for your review! We do have a time-tracking add-on feature in Float that pre-filles your team's timesheets based on their work schedule. You can check out how it works here, https://www.float.com/how-it-works/time-tracking. All Float customers are welcome to a free 30 day trial of the feature. An Account Owner can activate this from the Team Settings inside Float. If you'd like a demo or have any questions about how time tracking works, please feel free to email us at support@float.com. Thanks again for the review! Cheers, Siobhan

I like that I (as a project manager) can manage time easily for our team of two, but can easily add contract workers, and that visually it works for my designer as well -- he struggled with really seeing how his week needed to flow when just using tasklists, like Basecamp.

Anything I haven't liked has been added (e.g. ability to do recurring tasks, reordering tasks). It's a small thing, but we also spend way too much time trying to figure out colors for all of our projects after using the default ones. I would love to be able to add a project from the schedule interface -- like when I go to schedule time and I type in a project, it tries to find it; if it's not there, it would be nice to just have "add this project" without having to exit out of the scheduling box and go into Project.

I really like the possibility of having a global view of the activities and the possibility of having a fast (very fast) synchronization with the Outlook calendar. Furthermore, it is really useful to assign different roles to people in order to define planning permissions.

I am not crazy about the graphic style of the calendar / schedule view. Hiding over the weekend it is difficult to see at a glance the separation between the various weeks. Also there is no translation of the portal in Italian, not a serious deficiency, but if there were it would be better :) It also lacks the ability to view your schedule in a daily agenda format in order to have a more precise schedule of your commitments, as you can do through outlook.