Approval Due Date on Dashboard

I've created a dashboard for executives who need to approve many things. However, the one thing that is missing from both their inbox/to-do and the dashboard is knowing when the Approval Due Date is. The Dashboard only shows the task/project due date, which doesn't help them prioritize their tasks.

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Comments

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Welcome to the forums, @Pebble Lee! 🙂

Thank you for posting, this makes total sense! I've made the Product team aware of this suggestion now 👍

Lexi Allen

I absolutely back up Pebble's note. Tasks can become overdue quite quickly when the approver thinks that the final due date is their due date (from looking at dashboards, calendars, or to-do lists). Having to review each and every task to hunt down the approval due date eliminates the efficiency that Wrike should provide.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thank you for weighing in, @Lexi Allen!

Alice Kustusch

I have this same issue. It is very difficult to prioritize tasks when only the task due date is visible on the dashboard. Please fix!

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Your feedback is now passed to the team @Alice Kustusch 👍

Ashley Fischer

I agree with all of the posters above. We have the same issues as mentioned. Additionally, we have users who don't update the task dates, so the dashboard shows "overdue" for the approvals, when in fact the approver still has 5+ days to review. All of the "overdue" approvals make the approvers look extremely behind on their work (sometimes by months) when their manager reviews the dashboard. Most of our reviewers complete their reviews well under their due dates, but you would never know it looking at the dashboards.

Elaine McDonagh

Hi @Ashley Fischer, thank you for weighing in here and sharing your thoughts, we appreciate the insight. I've passed this on to the team 👍

Kimberly Wachter

This has become a major issue for us. The dashboards are not seen as valuable.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thanks so much for sharing your feedback @Kimberly Wachter, and welcome to the Community!

Arien Freymuth

I'm also seconding this motion. We've spent the last few months with weekly meetings just to completely reorganize how we use wrike to fit all of our internal processes, and the biggest issue we have is that editors just don't have visibility into the hidden mountain of approvals that might be coming their way. It makes predicting their workload nearly impossible.

In dashboards, tasks need to either display the approval due dates with their assigned approvers. Or, assigning someone as an approver to a task needs to create some kind of clickable phantom task (that looks like it's a normal task in dashboard view with its own due date) that links back to the task they need to approve. In the case of the latter, we should be able to assign effort to approval tasks because sometimes editing large documents that took days of research and writing is a multi-hour thing and the current workload system doesn't take this into account.

We really need this feature because our workaround is to create a completely separate task just for approvals within a project, which makes planning our due dates difficult for internal people.

Kelly Nienburg

This is also a major issue for us. It makes it impossible to determine if the approver is overdue or if the overall task is, which makes it hard to hold team members accountable and keep the dates clear and valuable in Wrike. Approvers find the dashboards less useful and it makes team meetings less effective.

We had also discussed the workaround of creating a separate task for approvals, but the desire to keep projects simple was ultimately more important for our team.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thanks a lot for your feedback here @Arien Freymuth & @Kelly Nienburg 🙌 Please also upvote the original suggestion above if you haven't done so yet as votes help our team see how popular a suggestion is 👍

Julien Galli

Hi!

I'm adding an upvote to this request: that would be greatly useful for our organisation as well. Tracking down the approval due dates by opening every task is a cumbersome process. Being able to manage this information directly from a dashboard, or even the board or table view, would be great.

Thanks a lot!

Anne Skonieczny

This is a significant issue for us as well. Our legal team does not have visibility into their deadlines for reviewing items. They are being mislead by project deadlines that display in their dashboards.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thanks a lot for sharing your feedback here and supporting this idea! We are reporting the feedback to our Product team and if we have any updates, we will let you know.

Casey Freymuth

This is perplexing on two fronts.

First, this is a genuine problem for all the reasons everyone has detailed here. We're having to choose between:

A) Creating multiple tasks (or subtasks) for a single deliverable that fragment vital development communications that need to be centralized for document/file/project development
OR
Meaningless dashboards

Second, and in many ways this is more frustrating, getting approval dates integrated into the dashboard shouldn't be a feature request at all. This is a bug. The approvals function was added to address the problems with A above, but failing to add it to the dashboard created B. Users that need the approval function shouldn't have to compete with feature requests to get a bug fixed.

As everyone has outlined above this issue causes business process problems for your users. We have no workarounds. Dashboards do not allow us to sort by custom field dates, so we can't even deploy a double-date-entry workaround to restore dashboard integrity.

Please consider submitting this issue as a trouble ticket instead of a feature request. It's a true break.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Welcome to the Community, @Casey Freymuth 👋 We really appreciate your very detailed feedback; please rest assured it will be passed on to our Product team shortly. And if we have any updates on this, we;ll be sure to let you know.

Phillip Johnston

I agree with Casey Freymuth. What's the point of having dates in the approval process if approvers can't use them to organize their work? I have approvers who are working off the task due date in their dashboard. They prioritize/deprioritize approvals based on that date, and don't review until the task was supposed to be completed. Typically, in my experience, approvers have been the people who also approve contract approval with Wrike. Please fix this soon so my team isn't forced back into using spreadsheets...

Elizaveta Bogdanova

We appreciate your feedback @Phillip Johnston, thank you for sharing it!

Let me explain how our Product Feedback forum works. We have a voting system here where any Wrike user can upvote a suggestion when visiting the Community. We have a process for reporting all suggestions, feedback, and votes from this forum to our Product team, and they continuously review all of this data.
Once any suggestion reaches the 60 votes threshold, we add a Product status to it. You can check out more info on that and on the list of statuses in this post. For now, this suggestion is on the lower side of upvotes, so please "like" the main post above 👍

Patty Perez

Has there been any additional discussion in getting Approvals Due Date recognized in Dashboards? This is critical for many. Are there any work-arounds? I agree with many of the above comments. Approval Due Date is useless if "Task" date is used.

Juan Muttoni

Hello @Patty Perez, thank you for your comment, I understand this is an important option for you and your team and I've shared your feedback with our Product Team. In case we're informed of any changes implemented to this feature, we will keep you updated in this thread 👍

Arien Freymuth

@Patty Perez We're always trying to figure out wrike workarounds within our own company. We somewhat recently found a workaround that we decided not to pursue, but it might work for you (you'll have to see). If you have the right access, you can go to wrike.com/labs and turn on their experimental New Dashboards feature. The new dashboards basically let you turn each widget into a Table View with custom columns.

Now the irony is that Approval Due date is still a field you can't add. However, you can create a custom date field that serves as an approval due date. But there are caveats:

It does not actually function like approval due date – the field is just informational
If the dashboard widget is not wide enough, all of the custom columns will vanish and it will display the limited old widget data by default.
This naturally adds an extra step to task creation (something redundant because you're probably already scheduling the approval date).

Our takeaway was that we could at least get the information to show in the dashboards if we kept a single, very wide widget at the top of the screen and went this custom field route. Ultimately, we decided against it because it wasn't worth the effort and we didn't like the UI of tables being forced into widgets.

You could try that.

We've been stuck doing Custom Item Type sub-tasks specifically for edits/reviews and then making widgets that filter for those on our dashboards. Less than ideal because all of our work is document-oriented so everything should be happening in one task... but, it at least gives our internal people a widget of reviews by due date to use.

We've wanted this feature for years, but they still haven't added it. We've brought this up with the customer success team during yearly reviews during the last two years, but nothing has happened.

Juan Muttoni

Hi @Arien Freymuth, thank you very much for your detailed comment. Please, allow me to clarify that in New Dashboards you can choose which columns to display when using the Table Mode:

By adjusting these settings, you can reduce the width of your widget - or even create one that would only include data related to approvals/dates.

If you have any additional questions about New Dashboards or any other feature, please let us know 🙂

Joan Prangnell

I agree with the comments above, getting visibility to Approval Due Date is critical for reviewers to understand their priorities. Simply enabling Approval Due date as a column you can add to a table view would do the trick. As a workaround, I am experimenting with creating a custom widget on a New Dashboard and filtering to include records for a certain time frame using the Approval due date filter. It means there are several widgets on a dashboard, each which shows the reviewer things that are due "today", "this week", or "this month", or some custom time frame of your choosing. Not ideal, but hopefully better than no way to prioritize by Approval due date at all.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Great to hear you're leveraging New Dashboards for this use case @Joan Prangnell!

Patty Perez

This now has 68 votes! At the end of the day, the new Dashboard functionality work-arounds are NOT helpful. Don't we now have enough votes to finally get this programed to see the Approval Due Date as an option? I need to see the Task name with the "Approval Due Date"... Not the "Task Due Date". Only one Approval can be applied to one Task at a time, so what is the issue? As I copy and paste to demonstrate how it might look, I can see there may be a bunch of variables arise, like color red if it is past due. But in all fairness to our request more than 4 years ago, please consider the simplest way. Thanks in advance!

Juan Muttoni

Hi @Patty Perez, thank you for your detailed comment. Please, allow me to clarify that, as stated in Product Feedback forum: Guidelines and Statuse, once an idea reaches the threshold of 60 upvotes, it receives a public status, which doesn't exactly mean that it will be implemented.

I've shared your feedback with our relevant team and we'll come back to this thread with an accurate reply about the plans for this suggestion - and we'll update the status of the post.

In the meantime, if you have any additional questions, please let us know 👍

Martha Wilson

I came here looking for exactly this and I'm disappointed there isn't already an option for including approval dates in Dashboards. This is critical for our processes and keeping our stakeholders and leadership on track.

Fred Lunau

Upvoted this as well. Quite insane that adding the actual "Approval Due Date" to a Dashboard widget is not available, in order to prioritize and date-sort those. Any idea if this obvious feature will see the light of day?

Patty Perez

It has been a year since we have reached over 60 votes. It has been 5 years since we raised the issue. Although the filters in the Dashboard now include Approvals, it does not suffice for this request.