Editable Task Completion Date

I have started a project about a year in and am trying to track the progress of the project so far. Unfortunately whenever I create a task and mark it complete, it states that the completion date is today even though it was completed months ago. I would like to see an editable completion date (at least for the Admin role) so that Planned and Actual completion dates can be compared and reported accurately, rather than having a huge number of tasks completed on the day the project is loaded on to Wrike.

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Comments

Stephanie Westbrook

Hi Dave! Interesting feature suggestion, thank you

Custom Fields may help with your current project (as a workaround solution). You could add a field called "Actual Completed Date" (or something like that), and then enter the date that the task was actually completed in that Folder. You would then be able to run Reports which include data from that field.

Rob G Irwin

I too would like to edit the completed date. I've recently had to try to do a report on certain project items that were delivered each month. I have milestone tasks set up to record the delivery of these items. Trouble is, a handful of items haven't been marked as complete even though they've been delivered. I can go and mark them completed now, but they then stuff up the reports because they will be marked against this month instead of the month in which they were actually delivered.

While I can add a custom field as you have suggested, there's no easy way to retrospectively add this to the hundreds of recently completed tasks in my database so it would be an enormous job to add this field and populate it just for a handful of instances.

In general, the situation where a task is actually completed but the responsible person forgets to mark the task in Wrike as completed is a far from rare occurrence. Having the ability to edited the completed date would make accounting for this easy. Wrike of course could maintain a "Marked as completed" date separate to the current completed field to record both sets of data.

Stephanie Westbrook

Hi Rob, thanks for chiming in here, definitely helps us to understand different use cases.

Another potential option (workaround option) might be to change the task dates to the actual completed date. You can use mass editing to update due dates, which might make things a little easier than using Custom Fields. However, in this case, you would lose the originally planned finish date data. Let me know what you think though!

Rob G Irwin

Thanks Stephanie,

Using the due date isn't an option because I need to report on tasks that weren't completed on time. So I use the due date and completed date to determine that. Normally this works fine, but in instances when tasks weren't marked as completed until much later, this introduces issues that I currently have to manually clean up.

Interestingly, in my usage situation Milestone tasks are typically the ones most people forget to mark as complete, but are arguably the most important to have accurately recorded. They usually represent the delivery of something to a client, so don't entail a body of work for someone to do. So it's easy to overlook updating the status of the task.

So to summarize, the Completed Date field should be editable just like the start and end dates. There should be an additional field added called Marked Complete that acts like the current completion date and isn't editable. The combination of these two fields would provide accuracy of data while allowing easier governance and reporting of task completions.

Stephanie Westbrook

@Rob I understand, thanks for the extra details about the use case. We'll definitely leave this thread here so that others can +1 it and we can share the feedback with our Product team. Just trying to figure out if there's anything we can do with existing functionality to try and help now. I'm wondering if it would help to have a subtask, assigned to a particular person, and the subtask would just be a memo to mark the milestone complete?

Permanently deleted user

Hi David, this is not on the short-term roadmap. We'll make sure to pass your most recent feedback to the Product team and update you here if there's any change to this.

I understand you have tried Custom Field option Stephanie mentioned above and it doesn't suit. I'd really like to hear your thoughts on the other workarounds outlined above. Thanks

Justin Froehlich

I too would like the ability to edit the Complete date. Maybe limit it to Administrators to edit that date field so that Users cannot falsify completion.

Mike Furlender

I agree. This is pretty necessary. I always forget the mark the task as completed, and end up doing it long after the actual completion date - which makes the completed date useless for reports.

Kathleen Wunderlich

I need this too. We have monthly and annual task completion reports and they are screwed up when people forget to check the magic box on the same day that they actually complete the work.

Aaron McClain

I need this as well. Most team members (myself included) forget to update a task to complete the same day it was actually complete.

Tom Blodget

To requestors, while I support this feature as well, it might reduce non-compliance—and even improve work quality—to make reading and ticking off checkboxes, especially a final one for marking the task as complete, an integral part of doing the task.

Rob G Irwin

I can see how this might reduce non-compliance in situations where there is a nice, neat linear flow to work or where you are only working on a very limited set of projects and tasks. In my case, the team works on a very large and diverse set of projects and tasks and in many cases multiple people work on a single task. In an ideal world we would break the task list down more and maintain more structure, but in my real world things are a lot more chaotic and the sands shift very quickly. So even with the best of intentions, some tasks don't get marked as completed when they should. And often it's not until someone says, "Oh, we finished that last week" that a task is marked complete.

We get round this at the moment by having a custom field to add the actual completion date. It's a kludge because you have to fill it in even if you mark the task complete when it actually was completed. But at least it allows us to report more accurately on our SLAs.

Tom, your concerns could be addressed by something I previously suggested, which is that Wrike maintain two fields—one non-editable that logs the date the task was marked complete (let's call it Marked Complete) and another editable field for the task completion date (Completed). By default the Completed field is the same as Marked Complete, but if there is a discrepancy you can edit the Completed field to get the real picture.

Perhaps to address your concern over work quality, the Marked Complete field could have some sharing options associated with it, i.e. allow everyone to edit, or just a selected set of people. That way you could, say, limit the editing of the field to managers, which would still drive other users to mark their tasks completed at the appropriate time, but if something is forgotten, a manager can correct it and thereby ensure accurate reporting.

Justin Froehlich

To piggy-back off Rob's suggestion of a using two field to capture the complete date... Another solution would be to make the Complete Date a field that can or cannot be edited based on an Admin setting. Basically, an Admin would yield the power of whether that field can be edited by a User. By default, the date recorded would always be the date that the Complete box is checked.

Vytis Vyskupaitis

Not only Admin, but also folder/project creator. In our company it would be a pain to go through Admin every time I or other person would need this change.

Brian Petty

Any word on if this is something that is in the roadmap? It seems like such a logical feature. The custom field work around is not a solution, as you are essentially saying you need to do manual input on every project....which begs the question why use wrike at all then and not something like Excel?

Permanently deleted user

Hi all, thanks again for the use-cases and solutions provided here. Although this is not on the Product Team's roadmap right now, please continue to provide insight and votes for any future enhancements in this area 👍

Suzanne Burkhalter

It would be nice if there was a way to copy over data from one column (end date) to a custom field column (Scheduled Completion). I would like the schedule completion to stay static so I can use the end date column as the moving target since my dependencies are tied to the system field. In the future, having a way to pull the data from a system field into a custom field would be great (for admins only would be best)

Greg Waddell

Like other posters, I'm finding it necessary to go back through historical data and have a need to correct the completion dates. This would be a very useful features, as I'm relying on Wrike for historical team utilization metrics and when I find something that needs to be entered or modified to correct historical utilization, Wrike assumes the current date as the completed date, rendering my edits useless. So not being able to edit the Complete Date (as an administrator) causes the Wrike data to be less useful for historical purposes. Please add this to your roadmap. Thank you!

Stephanie Kline

I agree with everyone else that this would be a useful feature! We have a large number of tasks on each project, and if something is missed it would be unfortunate to make that person look like they are missing their complete dates. Our projects can last 1-2 years, so backdating during the month would not be an issue.

Drew Juen

This is literally one of my only pet peeves with Wrike in the last 7 years I have been using it. - really think they need to understand the workflow of users that are featured in this chain.

Completion Date should be able to be set to editable as part of a company preferences setup, maybe even be able to trigger a notification when it is edited. Theres a way to do this without sacrificing the need for compliance that some (maybe even most) Wrike customers require.

Andrew Shuttleworth

Echoing here. Definitely seems like this should be possible and is also one of the few irritations with Wrike.

P S

I run a construction firm and I so badly need this feature. Please implement this asap. I am using wrike in trial mode. Guess, need to shift to some other app until this feature is put in place. Bye for now.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Hi everyone, thanks for your input here. I don't have any updates at the moment. As the Community team, we always pass all the feedback to our Product team and ask for updates regularly, so any news - I'll get back to you here 🤝

Elizabeth Villar

Yes, as a new user just setting up my team on Wrike I agree this would be a VERY key feature. I am in the process of adding all the current projects and tasks, but many of these are already underway, so some associated tasks and subtasks are already complete. This means that all these things are marked as "complete" this week, even though they were actually done a week, two weeks, a month ago. And I definitely want to include them so that we have tracking on how far along different parts are, and so we can attach relevant documents/results/links and have those referenceable within this management tool.

Catherine Fultz

I agree with what everyone has said. I'm managing a schedule where the team members forget to mark their tasks Complete on the date it is actually completed. Then it is marked Completed after several weeks which results in an inaccurate Completed Date.

Karina Steren

I have been following this stream since the beginning. This is a very important feature that is lacking in Wrike. Considering this has been requested since 2017 by many people, I would like to know if Wrike is working on adding this feature.

Jeff Bisignani

I'll add my vote to add this feature. It doesn't seem to me to be a big ask and could make working in Wrike a better experience for many of us end users while not diminishing the Wrike experience for those who don't need the feature.

Sara Snuggs

Adding my vote, as well. Unfortunately, people sometimes forget to mark something complete the exact day they complete a task, and we should be able to edit that completion date rather than add another custom field for "Actual" completed date. Or, like my team, we are just moving on to Wrike and have 50+ active projects moving into the system; many of the tasks were completed in the past, but I can only show a "today" completion date.

Melissa McGroder

Hello Wrike we really need this feature! Could you please post an update

Daniel Rieger

@stephaniewestbrook, @lisa,

any update on this feature? i understand resource constraints (we use wrike to manage projects!), but it would be great to understand how this change fits into your development team's priorities.

thanks!

daniel