How Harvest helps an environmental agency stay on budget amid fast growth

In 2011, Panaroma Co-Owners and Principles of Tania Treiss and Susanne Heim, left their former careers to not only build a company filled with highly focused and successful professionals, but also create a great place to work. 

“Susanne and I started Panorama in  2011, and we were spinning off from a larger company,” Tania said. “Everything kind of came to head pretty quickly when the larger company tried to sell our business unit to a competitor, but we had projects that conflicted with each other. And so it was an opportunity of just, hey, let's just start a small, woman-owned business.”

They started with just five employees and since then, they’ve expanded to 40 team members and have established themselves as a leading provider of environmental consulting in solar energy, fire and fuels, and water utility sectors. 

Their unique approach includes a multitude of services, including public outreach, project management, compliance consulting, and creative problem solving. 

It was at the very beginning of the Panorama journey that Tania realized she needed a strong solution for timekeeping and accounting – and it was then that she discovered Harvest. 

Shaping strong business practices 

According to Tania, she built Panorama’s business practices around Harvest’s tools that help them better manage their projects amid fast growth. 

“I think we kind of built our business a little bit around the utility of Harvest. Having the visualizations of data where you don't have to go and build reports has been super, super helpful. And using visualizations to see where projects are, who's on the projects, how much time is spent, and how much of the project budgets have been spent is super easy.”

But it didn’t end with the visualization. 

“Even our invoicing has been shaped around how we look at Harvest — we have rarely ever had projects go over budget because everyone has the ability to see where a project is in real time.” 

Success in growth 

Tania says Harvest makes it easy to keep up with all of their projects, even with the fast growth they’ve experienced throughout the years. 

“Fast forward to now: We've got around 135 active projects and around 40 people. So we've had a lot of growth, and I think, honestly, Harvest has been integral to that because it’s easy to manage all of that budget information. Harvest has really changed the game for us in terms of being a really useful tool for a small business.”

Measuring billable hours

As a consulting firm, Tania and her team need an easy way to view billable hours for their clients — and they use Harvest to quickly address their statuses. 

“We just have a quick glance. We can see who's billable and who's not in any given day or week. And to be able to address that quickly with all the visualizations, and you can sort by billability or by total earnings or total hours — all that sorting is just amazing. And then we also love that you can export the data to Excel. That has been huge and is just a big time saver. So yeah, we kind of shaped everything around Harvest.”