I am excited to use the Reporting feature to have a dashboard view of project status. One critical thing that I want to do is to have a dashboard view of estimated time of team members in the upcoming week. In theory, this works, but there is something wrong with Asana’s calculations estimating time. I did the following:
- Enabled Asana’s “Estimated Time” field in the project(s).
- Created an Asana-suggested template for reporting with the filters of: Specific Project, Estimated Time, Due Date (with time boundary set of of “within 1 week”).
- This correctly created a dashboard report chart of what I want to see, with a doughnut chart of time estimated for respective team members. However, the estimated time is NOT correct. When I look at each team member’s list of upcoming tasks within the next week, all complete with estimated times, this is WAY OFF (by cumulative days) compared to what the dashboard report function says their total/ sum time within next week is estimated to do.
This renders this reporting dashboard functionality useless, and honestly dangerous for estimation/ planning/ expectations/ communication/ project management. I have checked all fields and logic scrupulously. There is something wrong on your backend with calculating sums of estimated (and actual) time spent of these fields.
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I am slightly surprised that you didn’t get a response about this? You have left this message in 2022 and the sum function in Asana is still not working!!! That makes my budget tracking impossible in Asana
Same thing here, there’s definitely an issue with the backend that calculates the sums of estimated and actual times. The sum works perfectly for a given project as a whole, but the moment you apply an additional filter (e.g. in my company we use a label for tasks which were Planned/Unplanned) the sum doesn’t add up.
I did extensive testing with several hypothesis but couldn’t get to a final answer. This is what i tested:
- Made sure all tasks in the project were correctly labeled with the given filter.
- Added the given field/filter to all projects the tasks were part of (which shouldn’t matter but just in case). No effect.
- Counted all tasks in each class (Planned/Unplanned) manually and compared with what was returned with a filter applied. No issues.
- Manually summed the Actual times for all times in each class multiple times, results are definitely different from what is returned by the dashboard chart. Only thing which is correct as i mentioned is the total sum without any filters applied (which matches the manual sum of ‘Planned’ + ‘Unplanned’ actuals).
- Strangely enough, the sum of Actual times for one of the classes is correct, which i believe is likely a coincidence.
- I’ve noticed several instances where the Actual time displayed for a task (either in list or board view) does not match what’s logged when you open the task. This seems to be linked to Actuals logged in subtasks instead of the parent one. I’m attaching some example screenshots.
- The sum displayed in list view contains the same incorrect number as the dashboard chart.
By inspecting the mentioned cases, the only thing i could infer is that the tracked time on subtasks is often not being added to the sum that is displayed on board or list view, although is properly accounted for in the task if you open it’s details.
E.g. for the second attached screenshot, that was the sequence of all ‘User added X hours’ events:
15m + 01mn + 12mn + 3:00h + 1:17h + 1h + 1:25h + 33m = 7:48h + subtask (2:25h) = 10:13h
You can see how the numbers match (although i missed a few mins in the process) the displayed data if you account for or miss the actuals of the subtask.
I hope this is solved soon as it would be of great value for us to have these numbers in a dashboard. From my experience this bug also affects the API output.
Sorry, missed the screenshot with the main example, this is the correct one:
Moreover, this bug is related to the presence of a filter applied to the view as i mentioned (and thus extends to charts which use filters), for the same task of the aforementioned exampled, if there are no filters applied in the list view, the values shown are correct:
