Wrike Admin Tips for General Cleanup & Optimization

I am not sure how transparent should I be here, but we learn from each other so I will be brave ;) 

• We have just formed a group with the goal to regularly review unused configurations and archive or move them to dedicated spaces.
• Plan is to meet once a month, select an area for audit and review and divide and concur with Admins to clean it up. We have a long road ahead, but also didn't want to overwhelm anyone as this is a side job for all of us.
•  Main challenge is to understand the usage of the feature. Majority of unused things apparently are owned by people who are no longer with the company but the UI doesn't help to easily identify those.  
• Cleaning schedule - no specific schedule as of now, but once we get to more meaningful state we plan on asking IT to own the maintenance on more ongoing basis. 

2 Priorities for our Admin group

• Archive unused account request forms
• Archive unused spaces.

My tip: 

 We have decided to start from space archival, as it's much easier to archive bunch of unused configs and custom fields if it belongs to a space that no longer active. So our first priority is to archive as many unused spaces as possible, You can imagine we have quite a few, given the account is quite old. Now one issue you might face is that some space Admins are no longer with the company, this is where you can ask our support team to assign an Admin to those spaces and get you access to Archive. 

Anna Grigoryan Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Infórmate sobre las funciones y prácticas recomendadas de Wrike

Anna Grigoryan Wrike Team member Infórmate sobre las funciones y prácticas recomendadas de Wrike

I have created recurring tasks for myself weekly/monthly/quarterly to ensure key cleanup tasks get regular attention. And it's rewarding to mark them as complete!

Love the ideas Anna Grigoryan!

How do you go about choosing who's a part of this group? Is this all Admins or Admins of spaces? 

In our company, we have 4 Account Admins. In addition, each space has an Admin in order for them to make changes within their space. Do you include them?

Woud love to hear how you decide who to include.

We're still finishing our initial build-out, but I've made some recurring tasks for myself based on what you've outlined here!

I have a dashboard that is broken down into 3 sections

1. All overdue tasks I create
2. All Active tasks by Assignee 
3. All deferred tasks

I am the primary person who adds tasks to Wrike, and it's so easy to set something up and then forget about it. This dashboard allows me to see the status of tasks that I create to make sure that they are still needed and moving through our workflow. 

Great questions! Here’s how I keep things tidy in Wrike:

1. Audits & Cleanups: I do a quick audit every few months, deleting or archiving old tasks and projects. I also check in on custom fields and workflows to see if they’re still needed.

2. Archiving: About once a quarter, I review spaces, request forms, and fields to make sure everything’s still in use. It helps to chat with the team to stay aligned on what can go.

3. Challenges: Sometimes it’s hard to tell if certain features are still relevant, so I check in with the team to get their input and make decisions together.

4. Ongoing Maintenance: Instead of one big cleanup, I schedule small maintenance tasks monthly to keep things from getting messy.

5. Wrike Tip: I recently started using the “Recurring Tasks” feature, and it’s been a total game-changer for staying organized!

Would love to hear how others manage their Wrike accounts too!

We archive unused spaces based on a team's request - it's usually so that we can make a new space and work through a totally different workflow and process. 

I audit project statuses (and locations - if we see an Active project living inside an Archive folder we need to make sure it wasn't archived on accident) on a monthly basis and ask the project owners to keep them updated. 

I would love a way to organize request forms by department (or space!) in a folder structure, or let users "pin" their most commonly used request forms to the top of the request forms area.

PHEW - this is a HARD one... agreed with most above - as time passes, people come and go - leaving behind a lot of clutter!!  Most teams have an established archival process, moving completed project into subfolders, to house and store closed and completed work.  BUT, nevertheless - there's still account clutter... so archiving spaces, closing out along the way is part of my daily "scrubs" - a little here and there!  When I have large spaces that need archiving, we usually discuss and meet, and assign people to tackle specific brand/client work.

BUT my new BEST FRIEND IN WRIKE - is TABLE view... did you know - under the mass edit, you can complete both Task AND Projects status by Mass Edit!!!

Jessica Kvanvig we have formed a cross functional group of Admins they are mainly people who are responsible for operations of different parts of the company such as Product Operations, Engineering Operations, Marketing Operations, IT. So the people who actually know what is used and what process should remain active.  

Anna Grigoryan Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Infórmate sobre las funciones y prácticas recomendadas de Wrike

Anna Grigoryan Wrike Team member Infórmate sobre las funciones y prácticas recomendadas de Wrike

Similar to Anna, we have a cross functional group of admins, but we aren't actively doing account clean-up or maintenance. But that will be one of the agenda items at our next catch up, I will also talk about clean up and maintenance in our company Wrike user group meeting I run.

One major thing to ensure is to delete users as soon as they leave the organization, especially if you do not have SSO integration built to ensure data security

Hitesh Karkal is deactivating for you not an option? We prefer to deactivate users to continue seeing them without the "X". 

Florian Gascho Deactivating would still utilize your license count, hence deleting is a better option

Honestly it seems like I am so pressed for time that I don't check my "overdue" tasks on a regular basis. Any tips to get in the habit of checking them on a regular basis?

Hitesh Karkal we're setting their license to "Collaborator" and deactivate them afterwards. But I get your point!

Heather Hernandez, get yourself a weekly Report of your overdue Tasks. Alternatively you can set up a reminder Automation or incorporate your overdues into your personal dashboard? 

We need some more proactive governance, so I'm appreciating these posts!

Something I do regularly is go into my custom fields section and see what fields have been used the least or never and evaluate how important those fields are to our reports. I do the same for all dashboards to make sure they are bringing value to the me the users. 

We aim to do a user audit every quarter to ensure that we are maintaining our license usage for the right folks. 

• We run an activity report over the last quarter, pivot table it, export the user list (with seat types), and use a vlookup to match activity to the users
• We assess based on usage who should be keeping their Regular or Collaborator seat, who should be downgraded from Regular to Collaborator, and who should be removed
• There's no clear activity count that determines who to remove or downgrade - we'll typically investigate at anything under 100 to see if they are really using Wrike or see if those with Regular users are using the capabilities that comes with this license -- it also helps to know your entire team to see who you need to look into closer (i.e. interns or temps, leadership that isn't using Wrike for much, etc.)

We have recently been auditing our custom field usage, too.

• Wrike Support was able to provide us a complete export of all custom fields, including those previously deleted
• We cross-checked this with the Wrike Settings>Custom Fields to identify times filled and last filled on (oddly not present in Support's otherwise robust report)
• We flagged those we believe can be deleted and run these by the authors/teams that it belongs to

Heather Hernandez Maybe a report to your email inbox once a week, review on a Friday afternoon as a wind down before the weekend.

Sarah Dungey Great idea about pinning request forms! Seems like the wild west. Should have a better way to organize and pin the popular ones on a user and account level.

Hitesh Karkal Florian Gascho I immediately deactivate them for security purposes but like to keep the account in case there's any off boarding that needs to happen - closing tasks etc. - and then delete when no longer needed, transferring the data if need be. While they're deactivated, though, I change the status to collaborator to ensure they're not using up a seat.

Our folder structure looks like this: 

Active Projects FY25
- Various Project Folders (by subject)

Archive Projects FY25
- Various Project Folders (duplicate of above, with Archive added to their titles)

It took a while to set up, but I have automations in place - when all tasks in a project are marked complete, my projects and one-off tasks, are moved to their respective archive folder.  The only thing I have to do once the fiscal year changes, is to add a new FY archive folder and reroute each automation to the new archive folder.  

This keeps our main active/in-progress project folders tidy.  I still do "spring cleaning" on a regular basis because there's always individuals who may forget to mark a task complete.  

If a user leaves the organization, we have an "Offboarding" project with their name which populates into our view. Within the project are various tasks for each of our internal systems, Wrike being one of them. This task is called "Wrike Offboarding" which lists out a whole host of cleanup items before ending with us deleting the user and completing the task.

This process ensures we keep user licenses in check!

• What strategies do you use to regularly audit and clean up your Wrike account?

We keep all of our projects for 18 months. Once a project is complete, the last person to complete a task, moves the project to the corresponding "Closed" folder. Once a quarter, I go through and delete the projects in each client's closed folder. 

• How often do you review and archive unused spaces, request forms, or custom fields? What’s your process?

As time allows, I do not have a process for this, I just go through them from time to time. 

• What’s one Wrike tip or feature you recently discovered that helped you improve account organization?

Table view helps me to mass edit tasks/projects when I need to move items, or when things need to be deleted. 

Our team has plans to do new Wrike training for all team members, since we have a lot of newbies. Our goal is also to do a sort of "spring clean" with unused spaces, ensuring old projects have been archived, and reviewing and updating our blueprints to better reflect our workflows in 2025.

• What strategies do you use to regularly audit and clean up your Wrike account?

We have automations in place to archive projects - once all tasks are complete, they automatically complete and move into archive folders. We do these by year. 

At the end of every quarter, I send a reminder to all our team members to check their tasks/projects and make sure they are up to date with completions, so that our quarterly reporting is accurate. This really helps as a general clean-up task too. I've shown team members how to use dashboards/calendars/To Do to find their outstanding tasks. 

When someone leaves, we deactivate them for a short period, then delete them and delegate their tasks to another team member, which ensures anything outstanding is always picked up. 

• How often do you review and archive unused spaces, request forms, or custom fields? What’s your process?

We have under 100 users, so it's easy to keep an eye on spaces and request forms - I mark any request forms that are not in use and drop them to the bottom of the listing, so we have them as a record, but they're not in our way. All our spaces are in use. Custom fields...that's another matter. As other parts of the organisation are coming into Wrike, I could see an unwanted proliferation there and that's something we will need to get to grips with in the future.

• What challenges have you faced when trying to remove or consolidate unused features in Wrike? How did you overcome them?

I wouldn't say I've removed anything that's affected anyone - the things we delete/archive are solidly dormant. 

• Do you have a Wrike “spring cleaning” schedule? How do you ensure ongoing maintenance rather than one-time cleanups?

The quarterly all-team reminder is working well.

• What’s one Wrike tip or feature you recently discovered that helped you improve account organization?

Nothing springs to mind at the moment - but I'm always looking for things that will help. 

Our admin team exports user data every quarter to review usage and manage permissions.

We do a quarterly cleanup!
✅ Start with archiving unused spaces
✅ Then review custom fields and request forms
Biggest challenge is identifying owners—especially when they’ve left the company. We use folders and naming conventions to stay organized, and automation helps flag stale items.

Recently discovered: using Reports to track inactive projects—it’s a great way to prioritize what to clean up next! 

User Review

• Annually for inactive users (we have SSO, so we ensure a secure account)

Archive of reports and projects

• Monthly, move Dashboards, Reports, and Projects to an Archive to reduce clutter for everyone