After you’ve created tasks, you can (and will probably find that you want to) edit them to set certain restrictions or allowances, add additional detail, and track completion progress. Here’s a look at the options BigTime offers for editing and updating tasks.
Viewing and Editing Tasks
As you know from Creating Tasks, you can create tasks either from the Project Dashboard or the Task Dashboard. You can access created tasks from the TASKS tab of a particular project from MY COMPANY...PROJECT LIST in the navigation menu.
Another way to view existing tasks from the Task Dashboard is by navigating to it from WORKFLOW...TASK DASHBOARD.
Whichever approach you decide to take, to open task details for a given project you will click on the task you’d like to edit to bring up the Tasks/Budget Details box.
Editing the General Info Tab for a Task
On this tab you’ll find the project, task group, task type and stage as determined from the Task Workflow Manager (see Setting up and Managing Your Workflow), a place for assigning staff members to the task, and a field to set the priority level of the task. There is also an area to add notes to your task. If you’d like to include these notes on task reports, this is where you would enter this information.
Additional items for editing include:
Marking a Task as Non-Billable
Creating Custom Fields on Tasks
Editing the Budget/Dates Tab for a Task
This is the area where you can specify start dates, due dates, budgets, and task progress by percent complete. Read Archiving Tasks to learn more about how the percent complete field relates to archiving tasks.
Editing the Accounting Tab
There’s a third tab that can be available from the Tasks/Budget Details, and that’s the Accounting tab. In order to see this, you will need to establish a connection with your accounting system. Read Linking Tasks to Your Accounting System to get started.
Task Editing Permissions
System administrators have the full range of editing options for tasks, but there are restrictions for other users. Everyone users by default have access only to editing task status. They will see a notice indicating this restriction level if they attempt to edit more than just the status.
However, if you’d like to grant more access to certain users, such as project managers, you can give them access to task administrator privileges. Learn more about setting user permissions from Customizing User Access Rights.
Troubleshooting
- IS IT POSSIBLE TO REASSIGN TASKS TO ANOTHER PROJECT? A method you could use for this purpose is copying tasks from the “old” to the “new” project. Open a project in your Project Dashboard and navigate to TASKS...EDITOR using the top navigation bars. Then, scroll to the bottom of your window, click the gray arrow next to the ADD TASK button at the bottom left of your window and select COPY. You could then delete these tasks from the “old” project.
- I HAVE DUPLICATE TASK RECORDS THAT I WOULD LIKE TO COMBINE. HOW DO I DO THAT? A simple solution would be to merge one of these into the other. See Merging Tasks to help you with that process.