[Status: Not planned] Editable Task Completion Date

It appears that Mr Pragel has been down this road previously and mentions most of the likely issues. However the development team may have other items that are in the way.  Perhaps if the Wrike development team can explain their reluctance, the wider knowledge base can provide a more complete solution if needed.  At least you could give us some reasoning behind the reluctance to provide an extremely desirable modification. 

Hey everyone, apologies for the delay in response here, and thank you for all of your feedback.

According to the Product team, implementing a suggestion like this would be a huge undertaking, due to all of the features that would be affected by it. One such example would be that the behaviour of filters across views would be inconsistent in the workspace due to some projects tracking one completion date and and some tracking another. 

I hope this provides some clarity for you. If there is any more information in regards to the status of this thread, I'll pass it on. If you have any further questions, be sure to let me know.

Hi Guys,

I just found this treat and I cannot believe that by default Wrike does not have a planned end date, vs actual completed date. Isn't this the basis for project management? I am in the process of updating old projects into Wrike since we would  like to have this program as our R&D PM platform. but how am I going to do this if I cannot edit the completed date?

I have tried the other options suggested such as adding "actual start" and "actual finish dates" but the calculations do not work because they are done in days rather than working days so even if I have the same dates as the planned task my actual duration looks larger than my planned duration

What is the status on this feature? should I continue working on updating old projects and wait for this option, or look for an alternative software?? It seems like this idea came up over two years ago and no action on it

Thanks,

Alejandro

Yes great comment Alejandro Arevalo and good luck getting a response of substance.  I can say with almost 100% certainly that after I write this, you'll see another comment at some point from Hugh or Lisa saying "sorry, we have no update, thanks for the feedback" and that can continue for years!  No insight, no reason why this can't be done (seems simple enough via Custom Fields and a little dev work that should be doable in 2 yrs!!), and no insight into whatever is on Wrike's plate that isn't this!!

If you aren't all in on Wrike I would look elsewhere if you really need this.  I am not trying to troll or damage Wrike's business, just trying to state my experience.  There are host of features that in my 2 1/2 years with Wrike I cannot believe are not being at least considered in earnest, this is one.  So I just want to say from experience if you really need anything on this board, it's unlikely you will get any insight as to whether it's coming for real, and when!

And sorry but while I'm here, @... re your previous comment - months ago in May - about "two dates," I don't understand that.  The issue is that we want to change the completion date.  Wrike adds it in on its own when you mark "complete," which is great.  But you might want to change that yourself to another date.  I don't see why we're talking about two dates?  I think Dave Carter is drawing a distinction between planned and actual end dates, the request is only to edit the actual completed date.

Let's say a project finished last week and somebody forgot to make it as "closed" at the time - happens frequently.  So now today I come in, mark it as closed, and it will perpetually show today as the finish date, which is isn't.

You guys also don't allow for this natively, since as you point out on this request, if you wanted to bring in automation to at least allow when all tasks are done for the project to complete, you'll pay ~$20 more per head on your license to get Integrate into the mix:

https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115004498989-Auto-Completion-of-Project-when-all-tasks-are-completed

And of course somebody has to set that up, so add in developer time as Integrate is hardly a "nocode" solution anybody without technical skills can deal with.

Really hope you guys get serious about some really needed features, such a shame most of them I am interested in (with 1000's of votes total) barely move on this board.

Hi Al Sape,

Thank you for sharing your feedback, it's been passed on to the Product team.

In relation to your question about Wrike tracking two separate dates, this is due to some situations in Wrike requiring the date the task was completed in Wrike, and which date the user has chosen to mark the task as completed. This might cause inconsistencies in filtering behavior.

The Product team is planning on researching this suggestion in the future, but there are currently no plans to implement this feature. If there is any new information, I'll be sure to let you know.

mdr

Another upvote for editable completion dates. I am surprised the Wrike design team didn't anticipate this request years ago. In the meantime I'll workaround with a custom field. 

mdr

Hi Mark (AppleCare) Millard, and welcome to the Community!

Thank you for sharing your interest in this suggestion. No updates at the moment - if there is any new information in relation to this, I'll be sure to update this post.

mdr

Thanks to the community for the support for this feature. It is clearly a must have for any project management software. I have used the work around with the custom field. Unfortunately, calculations with a custom field use “all days” while completed task calculations use “working days”.  If I need to calculate the amount of time a task needs or the cost of it my calculations currently are incorrect as I have extra days that are not working days, so it overestimates cost. For example, Friday to Friday (inclusive) is 8 days rather than 6.

Please make sure to vote for this feature at the top of this tread. Right now, there is only 70 votes, I am sure there is a higher number of people in need of this feature

mdr

I too find the lack of an editable Completion Date field to be a show stopper.  I was advocating my company to subscribe to this service, but I am now thinking of looking elsewhere.   When Wrike is looking to charge us $2500+/month for the seats I need, and they are not willing to add a simple feature like this after the community has been asking for years for it, it really makes me think I need to be looking elsewhere for a company who listens to their users.

Hey Troy Wielgus, thanks for getting in touch and sharing your feedback with us here. 

I've checked in for an update on this request and as soon as I have some more info to share I'll update this thread. If you need anything in the meantime, be sure to let me know. 

Elaine Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Aprenda sobre as funcionalidades e melhores práticas em Wrike com o nosso Treinamento Webinar Online

Elaine Wrike Team member Aprenda sobre as funcionalidades e melhores práticas em Wrike com o nosso Treinamento Webinar Online

Really sad to see this needed feature is going nowhere, and the last two updates from the mods are "we have no update."  Because unless Elaine and co. you guys actually start providing some detail more frequently, that how most of us in the community interpret your responses.  Your competitors generally give some fundamental information about what is the hang up on most thorny requests, and at least a bit of info about why they won't do something now, etc.  You guys continue to have very little in the way of displaying what you ARE actually working on - why is that?  I have to go into this forum and type a search on "Coming soon," then type another on "investigating" etc. to try to see for myself, when you could easily just publish, like a lot of your competitors do, a list of what you are working on.  I'm mentioning this as I dropped Wrike and am looking at coming back in, but to my dismay there is precious little change in most of the key features I'm looking for, and a year + has gone by.  Aside from the New Experience, which I don't think actually offers much functionality, I'm having trouble putting my finger on any release of any of the big stuff like relations, better boards, convert a task to a project, this request, time tracking for guests, improved list view with customizable field visibility, and other "bigger" stuff that I'm really hoping Wrike can implement at some point, since you have such a great basic design to the product.

Thanks.

Hi Al Sape! As promised, we've checked with the team - they are planning to make improvements to the task view, although there are still no plans to allow the completed date editing. We'll be announcing all the releases in our Weekly Release Notes forum 👍

I also wanted to mention some of the bigger releases that happened recently that you might have missed. Here's an article covering these releases that were announced back in October during our annual Collaborate conference. I hope you'll find some of them useful, especially Wrike's Automation Engine that many of our Community members found helpful 🙂

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

I'm genuinely intrigued by the company's stance on this issue. Is it based on the company's philosophy regarding project management? Is it problem with the underlying database that requires an immutable date in this field? The community's powerlessness to influence the development of a feature that most of us assumed was fundamental can be more palatable if it was coupled with at least a transparent reason for the multiyear denial. 

Seems the more I get back into the forum after being more inactive, I see a non-stop stream of pleas, like from Willie Freeman, which are unabashedly ignored by the mods.  How convenient that the format of this forum allows for Lisa, Elaine, and Hugh O' Daly to collectively select which comments they want to respond to, while continuing to ignore all the bonafide requests for real transparency around why the host of legitimate requests here are simply not acknowledged.  I cannot see anywhere in here when any of you have actually addressed the REAL questions we here in the forum are asking about the roadmap.

And Lisa to your earlier point, yes I follow closely your releases and to be blunt again, they are mostly fluff.  Collaborate had not much to offer in terms of substantive product update - I spent an hour watching the videos, all you talked about where how great Wrike is for remote work - which had nothing to do with product improvements, the New Experience, which has been panned rightfully so by many of the non-enterprise users here in the forum as an example of feature bloat, and some vague references to "AI in the future."  Meanwhile you guys can't figure out how to make a field that is clearly driven by a formula in your back end editable!!  And since you mentioned them, Automations are fine, but you guys are behind the times here as well - yet another feature you are late to the party with, your chief competitors have had for years.  So sorry you don't get credit in my book for that, especially when you will be charging me $20/seat for things like workload view and Analyze's specialized reporting, all stuff I get in a $10 - $15/month seat with most other tools I'm looking at.  And how about some simple UX fixes so you could actually edit Automations within task and folder views, and not have to take about 4 - 6 extra clicks to get over to Settings to find them?

I agree. The completion date needs to be editable or collaborators need to be able to edit a custom field for "Actual Completion Date." To me this a major flaw.

We are starting a new implementation of Wrike and I am also amazed that this is not an option! I know there was the excuse of that it would affect "too many other processes and features"

But how about some help with the work-around and make it so we can make a custom field that uses actual working days?

I have just discovered this issue. Another upvote for an editable task completion date.

Elaine Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Aprenda sobre as funcionalidades e melhores práticas em Wrike com o nosso Treinamento Webinar Online

Elaine Wrike Team member Aprenda sobre as funcionalidades e melhores práticas em Wrike com o nosso Treinamento Webinar Online

Hi

We need the option to edit the completed date too.

We want to use Wrike for billing customers when the task is completed and as it may be best practise, it is not always possible. This will cause us issues in billing and reporting.

I'm a little shocked this isn't an option and even more so that this thread has been open since 2017 and still no further in a resolution!.

Hi Greg Gibbs, thank you for taking the time to share your feedback here. 

 As Elaine mentioned above the team always aims to focus on implementing the functionality that will have the widest impact and benefit for the most users, and it's for this reason, that we simply can't implement all of the suggestions we receive via our various feedback channels.

I don't have any more info to share here at the moment, I've passed on your feedback to our Product team. If we have any updates to share here, we'll be sure to update the thread 👍

Cansu Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Aprenda sobre as funcionalidades e melhores práticas em Wrike com o nosso Treinamento Webinar Online

Cansu Wrike Team member Aprenda sobre as funcionalidades e melhores práticas em Wrike com o nosso Treinamento Webinar Online

This looks like being a deal-breaker for us. I can't believe something this basic is missing and has been met with stone-walling for 5 years! Our investigation into migrating our projects to Wrike as a platform has ground to a screaming halt at this point.

Welcome to the Community James Farrow 👋 I'm sorry to hear that lack of this functionality may not allow you to continue with Wrike. It's possible to set the needed due dates in Wrike and change them as needed, but the team doesn't currently have it in their short-term plans to allow changing the completion date due to the reasons outlined here by Cansu above. I understand this may be disappointing, but please rest assured that the team does work on some of the suggestions from the Community and they receive all feedback from this Community forum.

Please let me know if I can help you with anything else. 

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

+1 here for editable completion dates. When working with the agile features and measuring agile velocity, something that you guys are claiming is possible within wrike, it's important to be precise about the completion date. A week or a few days of delay in setting a task to completed can strongly distort burn-down charts and velocities and thus decisions on priorities and resources are impaired. I don't see how we can use wrike to implement proper agile methodologies if we don't have this feature.

Hi Gabriel Ortiz, thank you for your feedback, I totally do understand it. For now, the only option is to add a custom field. I'll be sure to let you know if there are any changes here👍🏼

Cansu Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Aprenda sobre as funcionalidades e melhores práticas em Wrike com o nosso Treinamento Webinar Online

Cansu Wrike Team member Aprenda sobre as funcionalidades e melhores práticas em Wrike com o nosso Treinamento Webinar Online

Adding my vote!  Any updates since 2019??

Hi Julie Watt, thanks for reaching out! This is currently not planned. Our best practice with using the completion dates for tasks and projects is to mark them "Completed" on the day that they are actually completed. It reduces the potential issues with reporting, and we have seen lots of users successfully adopt this policy. At the same time, human error is possible, and this is why we've been suggesting the custom field workaround - if you need to go back on a task to edit the completion date anyway, it can also be possible to update this additional field to add the "actual completed" date. I understand this might not be a workaround that will work for everyone, but I'm hoping it 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

I need this for the same reason as others. I have KPI's based on completion dates of milestones. It would be great if I could compare the due date versus the date the task was actually completed instead of just marked completed . 

Welcome to the Community Larry Sebak, and thank you for sharing your feedback here! 

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

Wrike are too busy making changes that have the biggest impact, like changing font colours.............