Subtask Actual Time not adding up to the Parent task's

Briefly describe (1-2 sentences) the Bug you’re experiencing:
Usually, the first item in a Parent task’s Actual time is the sum of its Subtask’s Actual time. However, we have tasks that don’t show this. How to fix this?

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Create a task
  2. Create a subtask for that task
  3. Record its Actual time

Browser version:
Chrome Version 114.0.5735.198 (Official Build) (arm64)

What version of Asana are you using (Basic/Premium/Business/Enterprise)?
Business

Upload screenshots below:

Hi @Trisha_Saromines, welcome to our Community Forum! :wave:

I’m sorry to hear that you run into trouble here! Our team was able to confirm that discrepancy is indeed occurring due to a bug! Our engineering team is actively working on a fix for this now.

They have shared that a temporary workaround would be to update your subtask’s parent task’s Actual time value; if a new entry is created and then removed, then the rollup will reflect the subtask’s Actual time entry.

We will update you once a fix has been rolled out! Thanks for your patience :slight_smile:

1 Like

I work with the original poster. We tried your suggested workaround but that didn’t fix the problem. The value wasn’t recomputed and we continued to see an incorrect total.

We are now noticing a warning. This shows up where the sum for all tasks is printed at the bottom of the section. Instead of showing the sum, we now see a warning symbol. When we hover on that, it says that one of the tasks has over 30 subtasks and that Asana can’t compute the sum in that case.

I’m not sure if we just didn’t see that before or if this warning was added during an upgrade. In any case, this is better. It at least gives some indication that there is a problem.

It isn’t ideal still. The total for the problematic task is still shown, but completely wrong. So that part is misleading. You have to scroll to the bottom of a section to realize that one of your tasks may be displaying an invalid value.

In any case, the workaround is now for us to split up tasks, so that no single task contains more than 30 subtasks.

Briefly describe (1-2 sentences) the Bug you’re experiencing:
We moved all tasks with June Due Dates (both parent and subtasks) to a temporary project. We tried sorting the Due Dates of all tasks, but it changed the Actual Times’ Total Sum.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Create a parent task, and add a due date (for example July)
  2. Add at least 1 subtask with the same due date month as the parent task
  3. Add Actual Time value to subtask/s & parent task
  4. Sort by Due Dates. Notice that only the Actual Time of the Parent task is shown even though the Due Dates of its subtasks are in the same month as its parent task

Browser version:
Chrome Version 114.0.5735.198 (Official Build) (arm64)

What version of Asana are you using (Basic/Premium/Business/Enterprise)?
Business

Upload screenshots below:
Not sorter total:

Inside parent task:

Sorted by Due Date:

Hi there @Trisha_Saromines , thanks for your flagging this! :slight_smile:

I have moved your post under this existing thread and as mentioned above our engineers are actively working on a fix for this.

Unfortunately, we don’t have an ETA on when this might be solved. However, we will notify you as soon as we receive confirmation that it’s fixed.

Thanks a lot for everyone’s patience! :pray:

There are two separate issues reported here:

  1. The total is wrong for tasks with more than 30 subtasks.
  2. The total changes if you sort tasks by due date (because subtasks then get removed, this happens even if there is a single subtask).

These are unrelated issues.

Our users have run into this same bug in our organization. This should be set as a high priority fix as it is part of the rudimentary functionality in reporting on projects.

There is also another dimension to this bug in that the “Actual Time” total will only roll-up two levels deep in nesting (e.g. Task and subtask) if you have 3 or more levels deep of subtasks it omits all items lower than the 2 levels. The screen capture shows a test project I used to verify the condition. I actually went to 4 levels deep in the parent task named “3 Levels Deep”, but it did not change the total of actual time when it was only 3 levels.