Allow "Actual Time" and "Estimated Time" to be hidden from Guests

Asana Community Product Ideas
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Problem Statement: As a project manager I want to be able to add clients as guests into my Asana project boards so we can use the schedule as a single source of truth. As these projects with clients are billable I also need to articulate the “Estimated Hours” for each task, and have my team capture their time spent as “Actual Hours” on this project board.

With the present functionality it’s not possible to completely hide the “Estimated” and “Actual” time from guests. The columns can be hidden but the data is still visible on the task and/or the guest can unhide the columns. Multi-homing the ticket and logging time elsewhere also does not solve this problem as all time logged on any project remains visible in the Asana project where the Guests are located.

Estimated and actual effort can be a sensitive topic with clients, and I don’t want clients to see the raw actual hours my team is taking. For example there may be tasks that we write hours off because the team are learning, but if this is exposed to the client before it can be filtered it may impact our relationship.

Other workaround e.g. having a completely separate project for the Guests isn’t a good long term solution as it causes duplication of effort and is likely to make things misaligned.

Proposed Solution: Make the “Estimated Hours” and “Actual Hours” fields toggle-able per project on if guests should be able to see this data. Where the user selects ‘Hidden from Guests’ any Guest in that project should not see any time-tracking data.

This would ensure the goals of having clients in Asana while also allowing my team to use the time tracking features could be achieved, while still giving the option for guests to see the time tracking data if the user allows.

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Hi Byron,

+1 to the idea. Meanwhile, here are two workarounds that avoid a fully duplicated project:

  1. Use project-specific fields in a private internal project instead of the native time fields. Create a private project (for example “Client X – Internal”) that guests are not members of, and add the client tasks to it as well (multi-home). In that internal project, add custom number fields such as “Est. hours” and “Actual hours”. Custom fields that belong to a project are generally only visible to people who have access to that project, so guests in the client project shouldn’t see them. Log effort in these fields instead of the native time tracking fields.

  2. Use the Client Portal (Asana Client Management) if it’s available to you. Instead of adding clients as guests to your working project, share a client-facing view where you choose which tasks and information they see, keeping internal effort data inside your team’s project.

Please test option 1 with a test guest account before rolling it out, so you can confirm exactly what a guest can see in your setup.