Hello all! My business is looking to use Asana to help with purchasing/acquiring businesses. I have created a template with all of the tasks needed to be completed by our business in order to complete a purchase. Typically we have tracked this with an excel spreadsheet and due dates are centered around the date we close on the purchase of the business. Unfortunately, this process has tasks that need to be complete before AND after the date we close on the business. I need to know how to center a project around a specific date with tasks due in relation to the date. For example, tasks 1-10 are due 14 days prior to close and, tasks 11-20 are due 2 days after close. I’m hoping to be able to roll this out in one template and not have to create 2 separate templates: “Pre-close” and “Post-close”.
Hi @anon69292265, welcome to the Asana Community Forum! You can try scheduling project dates from a custom template.
If there are set dates in the custom template, all you have to do is choose a start date or an end date when creating your project and Asana will schedule all of your tasks for you. You can set project dates from the project details:
When you create a new project using the custom template, you will be able to schedule your project dates:
I don’t believe there’s an automated way to do what you ask in a single template as you’re hoping.
I think your best best is to consider your close date as either the Start date or End date in the template instantiation dialog, and then adjust the other dates. I’d pick End date as the close date if most of your tasks lead up to the close rather than come after because that way you’ll have fewer to change.
For the dates you have to manually adjust, you could do that in Timeline view by multi-selecting so they move relatively. You just need to do one move of them all, manually doing the date calculation to adjust to the correct position.
Or perhaps there’s a way to make that happen more automatically with dependencies and a date conflict > auto movement which Asana supports, but I didn’t think that through because it might not be desirable for other reasons.
