As a Technical Project Manager in Sales Enablement, I need the ability to create a saved view or filter that shows completed parent tasks with incomplete subtasks.
Current Limitation:
Asana’s current filtering system allows me to filter by task completion status, but there is no parameter to filter based on the completion status of a task’s subtasks. This makes it difficult to identify completed work that has unfinished dependencies.
Requested Feature:
Add a filter parameter, such as “Has incomplete subtasks” or “Subtask completion status,” that would allow users to:
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Filter for tasks where the parent is complete, but one or more subtasks remain incomplete
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Create saved views to monitor this condition across projects
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Identify work that may have been prematurely marked complete
Use Case:
In project management workflows, parent tasks are sometimes marked complete while subtasks remain unfinished. This creates visibility gaps and can lead to incomplete deliverables. A dedicated filter would help project managers maintain quality control and ensure all work is truly complete before moving forward.
Business Impact:
This would improve project tracking accuracy, reduce overlooked work items, and enhance overall project completion quality for teams managing complex, multi-step workflows.
Hi @Diane_Ramirez
Something like this is definitely possible, it’s just not a direct feature built in natively, but I can show you how to do this for a project through a couple rules and a custom single select field.
- First, you’ll want to create a custom single select field. Let’s call it “Subtasks Complete?” with two selections: “Yes” and “No”.
- Next, create a rule:
- “When - Task or all subtasks completion status is changed” choose “Task” and then “When status is changed”
- “Check if - Tasks or all subtasks completion status is…” choose “All subtasks” and then “Complete”
- “Do this - Change Subtasks Complete? to…” choose “Set Subtasks Complete? to” and choose your “Yes” single select option.
- Then add an “Otherwise” branch at the bottom and then “Do this - Set Subtasks Complete?” choose your “No” single select option.
- Next create a second rule:
- “When - Task or all subtasks completion status is changed” choose “All subtasks” and then choose “Status is Complete”.
- Delete the “Check if” condition box if one is there.
- “Do this - Change Subtasks Complete? to” choose “Set Subtasks Complete? to” then choose your “Yes” single select option.
From this point on, any time someone completes a task but the subtasks within it aren’t complete, it will change the “Subtasks Complete?” field to “No” and once they are all complete, the field will automatically change to “Yes”. So if you ever want to see specifically which tasks are complete but the subtasks aren’t, you would just:
- Click the filter feature in your list.
- Click “Add filter” and select the “Subtasks Complete?” field.
- And make sure it’s set to “is” and your “No” single select option.
I’ve included screenshots below
This is very helpful, and I’ve incorporated it into our project template for new projects. I would need to apply this to 123 projects to achieve the level of cleanup that I’m targeting.
Yes, that would be quite a bit. How many tasks would you say on average are in each project?
If you chose to take this on, the fastest way would be to create a third rule:
- “When - Rule is run manually” maybe call it “Subtask Audit Cleanup”
- “Check if - Task or all subtasks completion status is…” choose “All subtasks” and then choose “Complete”
- “Do this - Subtask Complete? (single select field)” and choose “Yes” option
- Then add an “Otherwise - If all other conditions are not met” branch
- “Do this - Subtask Complete? (single select field)” and choose “No” option
You’ll be able to shift or control click multiple tasks at once (up to 500 I believe) and run this rule manually for all of them at one time.
So you’ll want to use the “Copy to project” feature for the 3 rules and add them to all of your projects (I believe you have to do this one project at a time but should go pretty fast when you get a rhythm). Add the single select field to your organization library and then add it to the projects. And then go into each project and do the batch 500 manual rule to the tasks to get them all set. And with the other 2 rules copied to those projects, it will then take care of itself from that point on. It will be a lot of work but I’m willing to bet it would take you less than a day.
Hello! I’m facing a similar issue, but in our case not all tasks have subtasks. So these rules are flagging tasks as “Subtasks Complete?” = “No” for those that have none. I’ve tried solving by using an AI rule to check whether subtasks exist, but it has to run on every single task completion and would consume a crazy amount credits.
Do you have any other ideas for how to approach this? I’m stumped.
(Still wishing for a simple setting that would allow you to restrict completing tasks until all subtasks are complete. 
)
