Hello,
One of our teammate left the company. The administrator removed the user from Asana and it disconnected the user from all the completed tasks from all the projects. We had to restore the user account in order see the user on the completed tasks
Is there a way to deactivate the user account and not pay for the account without removing the
user from the historical tasks. I believe this should be fixed if it’s not a feature. Historical records should be maintained for audit purposes.
Regards,
D
2 Likes
Hi,
Interesting request. I’ll let Asana in the person of @Rebecca_McGrath answer. In the meantime, maybe a workaround would be to create a guest account, with a dummy brian_left@gmail.com (with proper name and profile picture) and assign those tasks to this account… I could help automate with a script if needed 
This is a very important function, that I miss as well. There is no way to maintain this historical information in a proper way. But also to suspend/deactivate a user if they are not active in the organization for a while, but you know, they will be coming back later and you don’t want to pay for their not active account. I am surprised this issue doesn’t have more votes.
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hello. checking in on this query in 2023. needing a feature that allows us to see where a user worked even after they are deactivated. has this been addressed? and if so, how can i make use of it?
thank you.
Nothing yet on this topic.
This is a must have feature. In other tools, such as monday.com, they gray out the deactivate users profile picture in all the tasks that they were assigned in. They don´t vanish the tasks ownership of current or past tasks.
3 Likes
Keeping the account in a deactivated state after a user leaves is so necessary and so surprisingly missing. There should be some focus on User Management with the ability to activate/deactivate and change email addresses (e.g. when someone changes their name after marriage).
Hello, I am thinking about upgrading my plan but I really need this feature. I have a lot of rotation in my university laboratory and anything manual would not be an option. Anyone can confirm if Asana fix this issue and it is possible to deactivate users to stop paying while keeping all the information as it was introduced? Thank you!
Asana, have you solved for this yet? How can an entire audit trail be removed just because the user was removed? The user name should show as DEACTIVED or grayed out.
Project work/tasks need a solid audit trail. If an employee leaves the company, we REMOVE the user from the Asana license list. In doing so, all historical COMPLETED tasks now have a blank value instead of the name of the historical employee. HOW is this possible? Why doesn’t Asana allow us to remove a user but leave the metadata of who it was assigned to as a “grayed out-inactive” name or email?
Hi @Marta_Bursuc , welcome to the forum 
I’ve merged your post into this existing thread, which I see you have already posted earlier. It’s forum policy to create one post for the same topic, to keep threads and votes consolidated. 
Make sure to hit the vote button at the top of this thread!
Hi Marta,
Totally get why this is frustrating; audit trail matters, especially for compliance and handoffs.
Right now, if you fully remove a user from your org, the assignee field on their tasks won’t keep that user record. In many cases, the task history still shows actions they took, but the assignee field itself can end up blank. There isn’t a setting today to keep a grayed‑out “inactive” assignee.
What I’d do going forward
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Before removal:
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Reassign open work to a new owner
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Bulk-select the user’s tasks and add a quick comment like “Former assignee: Full Name” or copy their name into a custom text field for audit
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Thank you Liz! I appreciate the help! Especially with #3. That will be a good work around in the interim.
Hi @Liz_Carpio! I just tried to do this task and apparently Asana does not allow you to add a comment to multiple task unless I’m missing something. Can you please advise? Thank you in advance.
Following up here. Anyone else able to help?
Is there any solution to keep the user name of a departing employee as the assignee on completed tasks? We need to keep this assignment for our records and not have it as a comment that is buried.
Is there any way to escalate this as an update soon - I see this has been an issue since 2021, and is a critical piece that impacts us when a person leaves our organization and all their tasks get unassigned. 
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I agree that’s really unfortunate behaviour