Applying details to all tasks within project / Recurring tasks

I couldn’t figure out a way to contact tech support so I figured I’d post in the forum. I’m trying to figure out the best way to utilize Asana for our company (CPA firm) that is easy to use (so that employees will actually use it) but be sensible so that the benefits of Asana exceed the use of Excel sheets for those who are old school. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated as most of the screenshot/tips/guides I’m seeing don’t really apply to what we need.

Background: We are a CPA firm and are trying to implement Asana to keep track of tasks (clients) and projects (type of tax return or audit or some other task needed).

A few questions:

  • How do we assign details to multiple tasks? I saw something about selecting multiple tasks, but that’s limited to 50 tasks and certain projects will have well over hundreds of tasks and I’m not about to go through and select 50 at a time.

  • For certain tasks, we will want them to repeat quarterly. I’ve looked into the recurring task features and don’t see an option for quarterly… I tried to do a work around which is to create 4 different tasks (one for each quarter) and set them to repeat annually, but I really don’t want to do that for multiple clients. Also, I had the year in the task name, is there a way to automate changing the period/year in the task name when the repeated task comes up after hitting complete on the original task?

  • Every year, we’re going to have these tax returns and we’re not going to want to type in the client each year. For the first year we started using Asana, a whole bunch of clients were input (without marking them as a repeated task). For this year, all of the prior year tasks were “unmarked” as completed since it was easier to click a button instead of typing in names again. Problem is, all the history in the comment section show up which is annoying and clog up the task details. Is there a way to wipe all of the history out without having to go through each task and manually deleting them in the task detail?

  • Is there a way to assign a task to multiple people for multi-step tasks? I know you can do subtasks, but I’m assuming it would take forever to add multiple subtasks for hundreds of tasks assigned to different people. Is there a rule that can be created? For example, the preparation of a return is assigned to Person 1 and once completed, the review of the return gets assigned to Person 2, etc.

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Obviously I’m still new since I didn’t realize I had to delete “List item” in all of these and have no idea how to modify my original post…

Hi @Vivian_Chao, thanks for reaching out!

You can contact our support team following the steps in this post: How to contact our Support Team ✉ - #2

In regards to your questions, please find more details below:

  • You can use our multi-select feature but as you mentioned we have a limit of 50 tasks at a time. Find more details in this article.

  • If you want a task to repeat quarterly, set the task to repeat Monthly and select to repeat every 3 months. Please note that when a recurring task is marked complete, it will duplicate all the information into a new task with a new due date but it’s not possible to update the title with the new year. You can vote for this feature here: Possible to create a dynamic task name for task based on routines

  • Unfortunately it’s not possible to delete comments from multiple tasks at once. I don’t think we have a thread in our #productfeedback category. If you don’t mind, you can create a new thread so other customers can support this request as well!

  • You can use Rules and reassign the same task as soon as each stage of the process is completed. For example, you can create a Stage custom field and every time this field is updated, the task is assigned to the next person. Alternatively, you can assign subtasks but we currently don’t. have a rule to automatically assign the subtask to the next person.

I hope this helps! :slight_smile:

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