Subtasks / Custom fields and the CSV importer

Hi All

I wanted to post an idea surrounding my topic that, if do-able, would be actually be a massive time saver for my company.

Currently we manage streams of work for a range of clients. The work with an individual client might be the same work each week, but repeatable hundreds of times over. Think of it like branding hundreds of shops for a client that wants the same look and feel across each shop they have around the world. For each shop there is a list of jobs that you need to achieve to meet the required branding outcome, but all shops are different and therefore should be tracked individually. But then remember you have more than 1 client that wants to do this. So my first question is, how to set this up in Asana without making it too messy?

Question 1- The client can give us a spreadsheet of the shops they want done and we can import them as tasks for each shop. Perhaps this is best done via CSV import? But they come in as tasks right? So that essentially means I have to use tasks to manage each shop - that further means that I need to use sub-tasks to manage the jobs required at each shop.

Question 2-Subtasks we are doing the same list of branding jobs (E.g. 1) lightbox 2) glass stickers 3) outside signage 4) mobile signage etc) for each site… The way I set up the project in question 1 means each tasks represents a shop - I will therefore need each job within the shop(task) to be made up as a subtask. - How do I template this? Can it be included in the CSV file and created this way so I don’t have to generate hundreds of sub-tasks manually for each shop(task)?

Question 3-Custom Fields Lets pretend some of those subtasks are actually for sub-contractors not within our company. They dont want to work in Asana and we need to instead send them emails for each new request (subtask). Is there a way of triggering a templated email (including custom fields) to them as a new request as part of the subtask? Note - I am currently reviewing Zapier to do this but the triggers available don’t seem to meet this requirement.

Question 4- Custom fields - we have a range of custom fields we need to use against each shop. The idea being that if we have custom fields we might be able to automate requests to people outside Asana - but to automate question 4, we need the subtasks to also use the custom fields against the task. Is there a way of ensuring the custom fields attributed to the task are also attributed to the subtask?

Lastly, acknowledging that I have come in with a pre-conceived idea of how I want to setup this in Asana… If people think a different setup would help me better manage this then please shout out.

Cheers Nigel

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