[Status: Not planned] Auto add time spent on subtask to parent task

I just encountered this same issue in my testing today. Seems unusual that this doesn't already happen automatically.

Hi David and Kevin, thanks for commenting here! The current logic behind time not being added up is that often, subtasks and parent tasks include different action items. For example, a parent task is assigned to a supervisor, while subtasks are assigned to team members, and their time isn't always related. That said, I understand how this could be useful for certain teams and workflows, and I'd love to learn more about your use cases, and about how you use the task/subtask hierarchy. Looking forward to hearing from you!

The real issue we face is the need to group tasks (not as projects) working collaboratively on a total number of allotted hours across all tasks for retainer work we do. So let's say we have 4 hours a week to do tasks of a certain type. We want to be able to see at a glance where we're all at (all assignee's combined logged time), in order to see how much longer we have left of our allotted time as a team.

The closest we can come in wrike to set up this workflow is to create a parent task for each week, with all of the specific tasks as subs. We don't like the option of doing new projects each week because we want to be able to run reports on any number of weeks or months of finished work within ongoing projects. We can't use folders for that because folders act as our tagging system. Besides, projects also don't have a sum of recorded time entries at a glance in the UI.

As for the stated logic of the current way it works in wrike, yes, sometimes there is logged time to the parent task specifically, but we would WANT that to add to the overall allotted time for that task set. We would just use a totally separate task structure in the case that we want time NOT combined with other tasks/subtasks.

The only workaround we have is to instruct all assignees to subtasks to record their time in the parent tasks, and enter which subtask they were working on in the time entry comments. But this just adds extra and unintuitive steps to our process.

I suppose a time-budgeting feature at any and all levels of the hierarchy would be the best and most awesome feature (we'll request this separately), that would alert all relevant users when they're reaching their combined time limits for allotted time.

But considering the dev work required for a built in time budgeter, we would like to see time entries for all subtasks by all assignees of subs time to appear added up in the parent task's timer: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B34mIJWKb-e1MzhodEktTzRLZm8/view?usp=sharing 

Please add this feature... even if it's a setting (global) to turn on and off.

Thanks

Hi Anastasia, thank you for your comment on this issue.

My test case is rather simple. We are using Wrike for multiple website development tasks. We have an overriding project (the website project) with tasks underneath it (the multiple websites involved for the client). Underneath the task we have multiple subtasks (Technical, Content, Design, Meetings, Proof of Concept, etc). We log our time against these subtasks to know how long it takes to work on a particular design for a project. However, at the end of the day we have to total up the amount of time we spent as a collective on the task and add the time to it. The last 5 minutes of the day has to be spent doing this - whereby if Wrike had an option to allow us to auto-add the time to the parent project, it would be so much easier.

Hi everyone, thanks so much for the detailed explanations, this is really helpful! I can see how your teams could benefit from this functionality. Something I noticed is that it seems that the end goal is to see time spent not just on individual tasks (based on their subtasks), but on a Project level too. I wanted to mention that this is possible when enabling the "Time Spent" column by clicking the gear icon in Table View. Here's an example of the info that's displayed, where all time spent on tasks is rolled up to the Project level:

Would this help? Happy to hear your thoughts on this!

Thanks Anastasia, it is helpful to see the total time for the project level. There are a few ways to do this with a few clicks in the time log section too.

I know you weren't meaning to address the original issue. Even in this table view, the only totaled time appears at the project level, not also next to parent tasks. Even if it did, It also doesn't address this need to have this in an 'at a glance' way, since our team doesn't really work out of the table view.

Thanks again

Paul, thank you for your reply! I understand that this doesn't address the request for viewing total time tolled up to the task level, an I do think it's great that this request has been submitted and there's an active conversation going on here. It's really helpful to learn what different teams think about this feature, and the types of enhancements which would be beneficial for them. Thanks for taking the time to share all of this! :)

So will this be a feature that will added in the near future?

Hi David! This isn't on our nearest roadmap, but thank you for bumping this topic and keeping it active, this really helps.

It would be perfect!

Could this be addressed by allowing for grouping by parent task within the "time spent" report instead?  

There are ways to find this information -- the fastest we've found is to click the 'Show all records' link in the parent task's timer. But again, this is not an 'at a glance' way to see the total time spent on all subs and parent.

We need this too please. Asap. We use tasks as user stories in an agile workflow. Subtasks are development tasks. It's vital to be able to easily see the total time on a user story built up from its subtasks. 

When we need to delete a subtask, it would be better the time already spend  to be auto-added to the parent task. It will avoid to loose it. 

We need this too!

Even when I export in excel, the time duration are not in a format where I can select them and sum them easily. I have to manually transform them : 1h15m -> 1.25... It's really annoying....

Many substaks... lot of time to get a report on how much spent time...

Hi Anastasia,

is this feature now available? It would be very helpful. Currently we cannot make proper analysis at a task level, which is very frustrating!

Thanks for your answer.

Hi Anastasia,

+1 this feature request.

We are evaluating Wrike and would love to see the ability to sum up time spent on subtasks to the parent level. This would help us track our performance against estimates (which are only done at the parent task level).

Thanks,

Kandis

Hi,

+1 on this feature.

It will really help our project analysis to be able to see the accumulated time spend without manually check subtask one by one.

Thank you.

Peter

Hi, 

may we have an anwser regarding roadmap for this feature? No answer for more than a year.

As it is said repeteadly, it is needed. Regarding our specific need, this could lead us to reconsider our decision to use Wrike for our team. 

Thanks, 

Thomas

Oh yeah, it would be very helpful if i can see the total amount of time on the parent task or the sum of subtask to parent taks in custom fields :(

Andrea Rosales "Gracias por existir Ctrl+Z"

+1 for this!! 

We're currently using two systems which is causing all kinds of issues to track our time (and increasing our admin time) for a parent task vs. subtasks combined that would give us a total for that overall job, as well as being able to drill down further into more detail on a subtask/component level.

We don't work in projects as they don't work for our team, we currently have 700+ tasks in our workflow so having these as projects would be unmanageable.

Thanks
Holly

+1 for this as well.

Many of the examples, especially Andrea Rosales' screenshot looking for totals of sub-tasks, are what our team is looking for. Effectively being able to collapse all tasks to report on hours grouped there is what we're looking for. This gives a high-level view for management, without the clutter of the day-to-day tasks performed by individuals. That detail is still important for team-members, but above ground-level it becomes less so. This currently must be manipulated externally as described, or done with another tool altogether.

A simple "Accumulated Time" (or alternative intuitively-named) column that rolls up all sub-task time to the given parent would be perfect, but if you can only do it on the base task and none of the subs, that would work for our purposes with our existing procedures. This would allow us to collapse everything and export the current view, thus simplifying our reporting process upwards.

I need this Feature too. I would really help us in several way´s. 

Wa are also creating invoices via the API out of Wrike. Creating 1 invoice of a Parent-Task with 20 Subtasks is really annoying today.

Hi, 

We are currently setting up projects and templates and would really like this feature too. The only work around right now appears to be to make every single sub-task a task itself. This would be really messy and counter intuitive to getting organised. Is there any update on this feature? 

Many thanks!

+1 for this as well!

We set budgets at the parent level, and having an overall budget for the bucket of tasks that auto-adds the budgets of the subtasks would be perfect.

I read through the comments... if a manager is responsible for managing a set of tasks and that management time needs its own budget... could they not just add a "management" subtask and track to that time? 

Alternatively, every task could have a budget, but once a task becomes a parent to subtasks, a second field for task set budget could appear, which would tally the subtasks and the parent task into one.

Just some thoughts! This would be extremely helpful for us as we create budgets based on higher level tasks and then break them down from there. We can use checklists on tasks but then you can't have associated due dates.

Thanks!

Yes, all linking of work in subtasks to parents is excellent, this would be another great piece to have!

Is there any workaround for this ? I'm facing similar issue. 

Hi everyone, thanks a lot for your feedback and use-cases here!

Our Product team has recently released the functionality to rollup time spent and effort to the project level. I understand that this is not exactly what is suggested on this thread, but I hope this can help! 

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

Lisa,

This is great news.  Is this something we need to activate?  Is there a specific module we need (besides workload management) to have to see this "roll-up" capability?

Thank you

mdr