How to have subtask effort subtract from Parent task estimated effort

Is there a way to have subtask efforts subtract from a parent task estimated effort?
Scenario:

We often have a bucket of hours allocated for various tasks line items in our project that is typically a year long. . These task (or subtask items for these hours) are created as requested by the client any given time for random support.

We must keep track of the budget/hours we started with based on the effort hours, but as we create a subtask for delivery of the request (mostly design revisions, additions, etc with an hour or two here and there) I'd need this subtask to show on the workload chart and have it subtract from the parent task of hours. We need to be able to see how many we used and how many are left for all our line items like this so we know we are not going over and how much we have left for the year.

If we need to add an hour or two to the subtask on the workload chart that would also still need to subtract from the estimated effort in the parent task (not tracked time - that would need to be a different column). We can't go over budget with assigning more effort hours every time we get a new request and create a new task to make a change.

New to Wrike - Anyone have a solve? Not sure I explained well....

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Comments

Pietro Poli

Hi @Terry Winowiski,
in our agency, we often have packages of hours pre-paid by the client that we use to scale.
I'll tell you how we manage it, it's not exactly the precise solution to your request but maybe it can be useful.

In the main project we insert in a custom field how many hours we have sold, for example 40h.
Each activity within it has an hourly effort and we also use the timelogs to check the actual time.

I therefore created some custom fields that allow me to:

- Make the difference between "Total budget" 40h and the sum of the Timelogs of that project
- Check its progress in %
When the time spent exceeds 50% of the available budget, the label you see "NOTICE AT 50%" is activated (via Wrike Integrate) which notifies the PM of the status of the project.
This also happens at 75% and 90% of budget saturation.

Terry Winowiski

@Pietro Poli. Thank you. Our team wants to schedule individual tasks that use up these hours as they come up and schedule the effort hours for each request. Do you do this? How would we create a task for the hours to be used from the bucket when a request comes in without the added effort on the individual request adding to the overall project? Also, while working, if a 2 hour task ends up taking 4, if we change it on the daily workload chart that monitors daily hours, But, I think it will change it in the project and add effort hours and manipulate the overall budget which can't have happen. We may change or shift assigned hours daily as we work through our requests. Trying to find a way to pull from this bucket and track those assignments pulling from the task buckets while still being able to manipulate the daily tasks.