This is my first time posting and I’m very new to Asana. I’ve gone through introductory training, but am not sure how to piece the ideas together. I’ll try to describe my end goal, but I’m open to any and all advice.
My team has an existing project used for tracking Work Orders. WOs are typically viewed as a List and are organized into Sections by status (Pending Approval, In Progress, Completed…). The WOs have various custom fields (Assigned PM, Priority, Contractor Name, WO Number, Cost Estimate, Actual Cost…). This project allows our team leader to approve WOs, see summaries in the Dashboard, etc.
Our team would like to have a more comprehensive Contract Tracker, as each contract might have one or more Amendments to add funds, and numerous WOs deducting from the total contract amount. I have three vague ideas for how to approach this:
My initial idea is that an Amendment Tracker project could be made similar to the existing WO tracker, with fields like Contract Number, Amendment Date, Amendment Amount, etc. It would also be organized into Sections by status (Draft, Pending Approval, Approved…). This project would allow our team leader to approve amendments, and see what is being prepared or in the queue.
I can imagine the WO Tracker and Amendment Tracker being held within a Contract Tracking Portfolio. This would probably also be viewed as a List with columns like the following:
Contractor Name
Contract Number
Original Contract Amount
Total Amendment Amount (sum of Amendment Amount if Contract Number = ###)
Total Contract Amount (=Original Contract Amount + Total Amendment Amount)
Spent to Date (sum of WO Actual Cost if Contract Number = ###)
Contract Balance (=Total Contract Amount - Spent to Date).
I am not sure how to get the two bold fields, or if it’s possible at all. Our organization has access to the Rollup feature, but my understanding is that this is used to do a full sum of some column (i.e. Actual Cost) and can’t be filtered by another column (i.e. Contract Number). I have also seen guidance suggesting that Asana does not have SUMIF functionality.
I tried asking Asana AI and it suggested one project per contract, and all projects/contracts in a portfolio. However, my understanding then is that tasks within the project might be WOs or Amendments, which would have different fields. This structure would also make it challenging for our team leader to see all WOs at once, or all amendments at once. It also would mean abandoning the current WO tracker project, which may be a hard sell.
Another thought was that maybe all three trackers would be projects, and WOs and Amendments would be tasks that are multi-homed under the relevant contract in the Contract Tracker project. I don’t know enough about multi-homing to know how this would work. If a WO or Amendment is added with Contract Number = 123, and the WO/Amendment is configured to be multi-homed, will that update automatically appear within the Contract Tracking project under a section for Contract Number 123?
If you’ve read this far, I appreciate it. If you have advice - I appreciate it even more. Thanks!
Thanks for the responses @Irish_Makimura and @Bhumika_Bihani. I have started building a Contracts Tracker project. If a contract is a task, I would expect the WOs (and Amendments) to be subtasks within the appropriate contract. However, Contracts and WOs (and Amendments) would have different fields - some would be common, like Contract Number and Contractor Name, but others would not.
I also tried making Sections for each Contract/Contractor Name, as I noticed that multihoming allows for selecting a Project as well as a Section within. However, this still results in the same issue of inconsistent fields. Actually, when I multihome an existing WO row to the Contract Tracking project, all fields in the Contract Tracking project are blank - even if they have identically named fields in the WO tracker. Am I missing something?
@Irish_Makimura, when you say rely on relationships rather than calculations - are you saying that it is not easy/possible to do the calculations that I am describing (original contract amount + sum(amendments) - sum(WO Actual Costs)? Or is a way to see that using relationships (or reference fields as @Bhumika_Bihani mentioned)?
You’re not missing anything — multihoming won’t populate a different custom field just because it has the same name. The field has to be the exact same custom field across both projects for the value to carry over. → Save fields in your library, so you can also add same fields to multiple projects too if you like.
So if Contracts, WOs, and Amendments need different fields, parent tasks + subtasks can get messy fast. A better setup is usually to keep one source-of-truth task for each record, use shared fields where you need values to appear across projects, and link related items instead of duplicating them.
So the fix is: use the same shared field, or switch to a structure that keeps the data in one place.
I understand. I saved some relevant fields to my organization’s library, such as “WO Actual Cost,” and now I can see those values in both the WO Tracker and the Contract Tracker. In the Contract Tracker, with sections for each Contractor Name and WO’s multihomed as tasks, I can see the autogenerated sum of WO Actual Cost for each contract.
I think I have gotten to a functional point, but it isn’t very elegant:
WO Tracker is essentially untouched, but each WO/task is multihomed to the appropriate Contract Tracker section, corresponding with the Contractor Name. WO Actual Cost is a global field.
Amendment Tracker is similar to the WO Tracker. It has fields for Contractor Name, Amendment Date, Amendment Amount. Each Amendment/task is multihomed to the appropriate Contractor Tracker section, corresponding with the Contractor Name. Amendment Amount is a global field.
Contract Tracker has sections corresponding to Contractor Name. Within each section is a Contractor Name Summary. Subtasks include the original contract, all amendments, and all WOs. While collapsing the subtasks results in sums at the task level, I wasn’t able to do calculations based on these. As such, I added rollup fields for Contract Amount, Amendment Amount, and WO Actual Cost. Finally, there is a field for Remaining Balance = Contract Amount Rollup + Amendment Amount Rollup - WO Actual Cost Rollup. This field persists in the Summary/task row regardless of if subtasks are expanded or collapsed.
This isn’t elegant or pretty because the Contract Tracker essentially has duplicated fields that are always visible, e.g. WO Actual Cost (for each WO) and WO Actual Cost Rollup (for all WOs). This means that there are lots of blank fields depending on if looking at a single contract’s summary row or its expanded subtasks (original contract, amendments, WOs). The math does seem to work though…
One thing I can recommend is to set up private custom fields for specific projects. This can help reduce field clutter in a setup like this by limiting who can see specific fields across the multihomed WOs and amendments.
