The Tasks board

Tasks are your own to-do list. Not the checklists you send people on a portal, the jobs on your side: chase the insurer, call the referee, file the induction, ring the one contractor who never opens email. They live at Tasks and nobody you onboard ever sees them.

The same screen holds Workflows in a second column, the reusable sets of steps you apply to a task or drop onto a portal as a checklist. Those have their own article, printing your procedures manual. This one is the task list on the left.

What a task holds

Deliberately little, so writing one down stays cheap:

• Title. What needs doing, up to 300 characters.
• Notes, optional, up to 2000 characters.
• Due date, optional. Type it the way you would say it ("fri", "15 May"). It shows as a small date badge, which turns red and reads "overdue" once the date has passed and the task is still open. It is a flag for your eye. Nothing emails off it.
• Assignee, optional. You, or anyone you have shared the account with. Not the people you onboard: tasks are internal.
• Portal, optional. Pins the task to one portal (search by name), or leave it as a general job for your business.

Working the list

New task opens the form. A title is all it needs; everything else can wait.

Each row carries a checkbox to mark it done, an Edit button, a drag handle, and a delete (✕). A done task dims, its title is struck through, and it shows who ticked it and when. Deleting is immediate with no confirmation, because a task is cheap to re-add, and it takes the task's steps with it. Open tasks always sort above done ones, and you set the order within that by dragging.

The Tasks item in the menu carries a badge counting the open tasks assigned to you.

Three filter groups sit above the list, and they combine:

• Open / All. Hide finished tasks, or show everything.
• Everyone / Mine. The whole account's tasks, or only the ones assigned to you.
• Flat / By portal / By assignee. One list, or sections. By portal gives a section per portal with a General section at the end for tasks pinned to none. By assignee gives a section per person with Unassigned last, and it only appears once you have shared your account, since on a solo account every task is yours. Your choice of layout is remembered in your browser.

In the Flat view the list pages at 20 tasks. The line under it reads something like "Showing 1 to 20 of 63", and the open count beside it is for the page you are on, not the whole list. Dragging reorders within the page you can see.

By portal and By assignee page by section instead: up to 8 portals (or people) per page, and a section is never split across two pages. The number beside each section heading is that section's open tasks in total. A section shows up to 200 tasks, open ones first. A section holding more than that says so under its list ("Showing 200 of 340 tasks here, open ones first"), and choosing Open hides the finished ones.

Ticking, editing or deleting a task, or adding a step, keeps you on the page you are on.

Steps, for jobs that are really a process

Under every task is an Add steps link. Open it, type a step, press Add, repeat. Nothing to set up first. A task holds up to 200 steps.

Steps tick off independently and drag into order within their task, and the task shows progress as a count like 3/5. Ticking the last step does not tick the task: the moment a job is genuinely finished is a judgement call, and the last real act is often not one of the steps.

Steps stay under their task. You cannot drag one across to another job, and a step carries no due date or assignee of its own, because the task is the job and the steps are how it gets done.

Once you have built a set of steps worth keeping, Save as workflow turns them into a reusable set named after the task. That is how most workflows get made: you do the job once, realize you will do it again, and save it.

Tasks that make themselves

Two things create tasks without you typing them.

Applying a workflow. Each workflow row has an Add button, which creates one new task named after the workflow with all its steps ready to tick. Run the same workflow twice for two different people and you get two tasks you can tell apart, rather than two batches of identical loose lines.

Automations. An automation can create tasks as its action, applying a workflow when something happens in a portal. Completing an onboarding can hand you the internal follow-up work automatically. See automations.

On a portal

Each portal page has a Tasks section, marked For admins, listing that portal's tasks. You can add tasks there, and Apply workflows lets you tick several workflows at once, giving one task per workflow. A task pinned to a portal also appears in the main list, so you can work everything in one place or group by portal, whichever suits.

This is the part worth keeping straight, because the words are similar. Tasks are yours: internal jobs, invisible to the people you onboard. A Task request on a portal is theirs: a checklist you send them to work through, and it counts toward their completion. Same underlying idea, opposite direction. Task requests are covered in asking for documents and info.

If you delete a portal, its tasks are not lost. They fall back to your general list.

What tasks do not do

No reminders, no emails, no notifications. The due date is a visual flag, not a trigger. If you want something to go out on a schedule, that is automations.

They also cannot be assigned to the people you onboard, only to you and the people you have shared the account with.

Getting help

If something here does not match your screen, open a ticket or email [email protected].