[Status: Backburner ⌛️] Filter out subtasks in reports

Hi Boaz. Thank you for submitting this feature request. We already have a few similar requests from our users, and we'll make sure to send users with these requests to upvote your post.

Ksenia T Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Conosci le straordinarie funzionalità di Wrike e le best practices

Ksenia T Wrike Team member Conosci le straordinarie funzionalità di Wrike e le best practices

Thanks, Ksenia -- this is a good workaround for the time being. 

Unfortunately, that workaround only works for higher priced plans. 

I, too, would love a way to filter out the subtasks. Is there a workaround for lower tier plans?

Hi Jeffrey! You're right, the workaround stated here includes the Custom Fields feature, and the end goal of it is to ease Report creation. Reports are part of the same plans as Custom Fields, so I just wanted to make sure that your request is about generally having a filter option available for views such as List, Table, etc.?

What would be most useful at the moment would be the ability to filter completed tasks, excluding subtasks. We currently use top-level tasks to track projects as there is a beginning and end to each project. Once a project is completed (this month) we are trying to use filters in order to show the completed projects in the dashboard via widget ("projects completed this month"). However, since projects have several sub-tasks, this widget ends up showing EVERY individual task that's been completed this month. All we want to see is the "top-level" tasks completed this month*.

*On that note, it would also be helpful to have a filter for the past 3-6 months or "this year".

To be clear, we're not really worried about reports. This is more of an ongoing, dynamic gauge progress.

Jeffrey, thanks for following up and clarifying! On the topic of filters, I wanted to share another request which you may be interested in voting for: Add Future Time Frames in Dashboard Filters. There's a great discussion going on there around the different types of filters different teams would benefit from. Happy to see your vote there too!

I'm interested in this as well (I've upvoted Boaz's original request). We currently make our deliverables (videos, one-pagers, etc) projects in Wrike, with subtasks underneath. But with a team of 14 and approximately 50 deliverables currently active, our task views are unwieldy, and outside of reports there's no way to view high level projects easily in the many great views that Wrike offers. I'm considering switching our deliverables to tasks and using subtasks for each stage (multiple people often work on a deliverable), but without subtask filtering in reports, we can't report on work we've completed in the past year, month, etc. which is crucial for us if we want to expand our team (which we need to do).

Hi Matt, thanks for sharing! Depending on the scope of work you include in those subtasks, it does sound like pushing everything one level up could make sense. How many subtasks do you usually have within one task?

Here's a setup that could potentially help: 

• Folders for organizing and grouping Projects by type of deliverable (e.g. Videos, One-pagers).
• Projects for the deliverables.
• Tasks for action items and steps needed to complete the Project.
• Reports can then be run by status of action items within those Projects, as well as by type of deliverable (based on the Folder they're in). You can even simply open up one of these Folders to look at how things stand for a certain type of job.

Happy to hear your thoughts on this, as well as dive into more details!

Thanks, Anastasia. This is ver similar to what we're doing now. We have folders for requester (HR, Sales, Ops, etc.) and a custom field that denotes what each project (deliverable) is, so PowerPoint, video, etc. We have anywhere from 2-6 tasks per project/deliverable. With 45 active deliverables that creates very long lists in all but the reports view. Maybe we just need to reduce the number of projects active at any given time! Or selectively look into those folders. Those birds eye views of everything and where they stand in the workflow (some semblance of % completion) is helpful. 

I did work out that if we switched our deliverables to tasks, and label each task with that custom tag for type of project, I can run a report that requires that custom field to be filled. This filters out the sub-tasks, similar to what you mentioned earlier in the thread. 

Then there's the fact that we just rolled Wrike out, and I'm hesitant to change too much too quickly. Don't want to confuse the team. These forums are great though for me to bounce ideas around and get feedback from Wrike and other users. Thanks for the help!

Matt, thanks for following up, and it's great to see you turning to the Community for tips on getting started :) Just let me know if you have any questions about best practices, I'll be happy to help you and your team get on board! :)

I was pointed to the feature request from Anton.

Adding on to what Boaz is saying (assuming our needs are similar), I would assume this also would mean that the search commands would be altered as well.

What we find is doing something like: 

folder: folder_name

only filters out tasks which are directly assigned to the folder. This means sub-tasks have "ghost tags" to folder_name (these are the light gray versions of the tag) and are will not be filtered out. Directly assigning the folder to the sub-tasks (they recommended mass editing for this) does certainly work. But at the end of the day, this our time. Wrike is tool that is supposed to help us maximize our time.

The implementation is probably trivial. The tasks coming back are already denoted as possessing the ghost tag of folder_name (in my example). So the data is there.

The current search command could be naturally extended to something like 

folder*: folder_name

or even something more elaborate like

folder_including_glosts: folder_name

I deliberately made it long and gross for this example 😀

I will admit that given the cost of using this product, I'm astonished that such a basic feature does not exist. 

Hi Ben, I like your logic here in terms of the search enhancement. It's something our Product Team is always interested in hearing i.e. how people use Search in their ways of working.

Thanks for sharing!🙌

Wrike will definitely gain from this filter! In someway the filter should allow users to divide tasks in the following parts: parent tasks, subtasks only, all tasks. And this filter should work not only for the reports but for all other task views.

Hi all, just wanted to update you here with a related release that people here may be interested in. It's Structured (or Hierarchy) Reports. Now you can see subtasks under their parent tasks and parent tasks under the Folders or Projects.

You can read more about this, and provide your feedback here 👍

This is cool. Thanks Stephen and Wrike team! I wanted to let this thread know as well that we switched our creative design deliverables (video, powerpoint, brochure, infographic, etc.) from projects to tasks (stored in a single folder), and this has made work with Wrike much simpler, in my opinion. As a team with many unrelated deliverables at any given time, this has helped us gain a better bird's eye view of everything we have going on without having to run a report or dive in and out of folders. We can use sub-tasks as needed, and then filter them out of reports based on the presence of a custom field. I haven't dabbled too much with Structured Reports, but I would imagine we could do similar things with that as well. Anyway, just my 2 cents. Tasks are where it's at as far as Wrike is concerned (and our workflow).

This is great, but is there a way to autocollapse subtasks? It would be great to give this as an option when creating the report. I only want to show the parent tasks in my quarterly reports as we have so many subtasks. When everything is expanded, then there is too much to review. I see that you have the expand all/collapse all buttons, but when I do that the only thing that is left is the parent folder. 

+1 for this! Another feature one would think is basic.

We would benefit greatly from this feature. Our projects start off as one task that the developer can add details to using subtasks if they want. Unfortunately, the subtasks are gumming up some of our reports and dashboards with unnecessary and sometimes misplaced detail (misplaced when the value on the subtask doesn't match the parent task; e.g.: importance). We're starting to take the custom field approach but don't like the maintenance work that requires.

I agree that this feature would be greatly beneficial.  I was able to create a custom field to add this option, but it should exist in the software by default.  The software should be able to differentiate between projects, tasks and subtasks for reporting purposes, and let the user decide which to include in his or her report.

I've given up on Wrike. I already started my exodus and won't renew when my sub ends next month. Too many issues they don't resolve and I swear it's gotten buggier with the first step solution always being "clear your cache" or "try a different browser".

Their iOS apps are terrible and crash quite a bit (at least the iPad version). So it's all on par. 

It's pretty clear the management that be has a different viewpoint of important features.

I just created a very similar request (671820). Agree with most of the comments here, but I think that, rather than the filter, it would be more useful the option to collapse/expand subtasks (and maybe also tasks). The default view (collapsed/expanded) should be defined during the report setup.

Hey Paco,

If I understand what you're wanting, I think it's already available. Reports have a hierarchical view that shows the folder structure instead of the groupings defined on the report. As far as the default view, reports seem to remember quite a few of the display settings from one visit to the next, but I'm not sure about one user to the next.

Hi Joshua

Many thanks for your response. I didn´t know about that functionality. I tested it but unfortunately it wasn´t what I am wanting. The hierarchical view just change the indentation, but all subtasks are always there, so they never collapse.

My request is about collapsing the subtasks in a similar manner as you can do in the Gantt Chart.

 Just noticed that there is a similar request done by another Wriker here.

Adding support here. We are building reports that will help team leads manage their direct reports' workloads, and the subtasks show up (artificially inflating the proposed job count). Thanks!

I also need this very much. We use top-level tasks to track customer deliverable and use sub-tasks for internal delegation and execution. Customer-facing reports that only include their request tasks statistics are being cluttered with a lot of sub-task noise.

Thanks!

There are certain reports that we create that are a set of tasks and subtasks within the project. Right now these reports are created using fields. Is it possible to add a feature to drill down to the task and sub-task level when you are choosing your source data in the report template builder?

Hi everyone, thank you for your continued support for this feature. I've added the "Backburner ⌛️" status to this suggestion and I'll get back to you when I have an update. All the feedback here is passed to our Product team 🤝

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

We need this feature as well.  If we run a report on tasks, it includes the task and sub-tasks that duplicates the task level information.  We track story point estimates at the task level and sub-task level, so when summing the report by assignee it doubles the point values.  We have a workaround for now, but ideally this would exist as a feature.

Hi again, everyone! Currently, the status is not updated, I'm hoping that I'll be able to bring you news on this one next quarter. 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

We have a problem just like that. I need a view were i can extract a report with all timelogs about the parent task and subtasks.
A parent task is divided into several subtasks with different time entries. And my clients receive a report with all timelog, grouped. Making this with a calculator doesn't make sense, in my opinion. We have an alternative?