Issue with users copying tasks

[LanaLa]

Hello, 

We bill our clients monthly by using Fusion to sum the planned revenue of all tasks completed in the previous month (with some other criteria). The scenario then adds '666' story points to those tasks which essentially says they have been 'billed' so they don't then bill again the next month. This was set up when my company first moved over to Workfront.

A few months ago I noticed some projects weren't billing correctly and it seems that tasks that have previously been billed (and therefore have '666' story points assigned) are being copied within projects, and so weren't billing again when they needed to.

We've communicated this out to our users asking them to not copy tasks, but it still seems that this is happening each month. I have a report that I review each month that shows me the tasks that have '666' and were completed in the relevant previous month (and therefore shouldn't have '666' on them), but there is the chance that the tasks have been completed, billed, and then re-opened and completed again. I can check this through system updates, but wondered if it's possible to check if a task has been copied and what the original task was - so I can pick up particular scenarios with users (before possibly accusing them of copying tasks when they may not have done so)?

Alternatively, is there a way of preventing tasks being copied so I can prevent this from happening in the first place?

Thank you

Lana

[skyehansen]

we did something fairly similar with one of our workflows that involved a calculated field. I don't remember what it is now, but I can look it up if you can't get anything working on your end.

1) we have a custom form on all these tasks

2) the custom form has a calculated field on it where if the field is blank it displays the task ID (or the task reference number if you like)

3) this means when a task is created (or maybe billed in your case) and the custom form is placed, the calculated field is blank and because of this, it should display the task ID.

4) when the task is copied, the custom form comes with it and because it already has a task ID, that ID should stay put and you'll be able to tell it's a copy because the two IDs (your new task ID and the custom form field) will not be identical.

there's probably some sort of fusion automation you can put in place for this type of thing as well (every time a task is created with this custom form, if the IDs do not match the calculated field, just delete the task)

[LanaLa]

Hi Skye, thank you for the suggestion. This process sounds like it would work for what we need - I'll give it a go to put this together and see how it goes! Thanks, Lana

[SuryaLakhani]

You can try adding a validation to the field, something like this:

IF({DE:Billing Status} >0 && {status} == "NEW", "This cannot be billed yet")

While this would still bring the value over, whenever the user tries to edit the form, it will not let them save until they have cleared the field (assuming the ticket will be edited while still in New status).

If you want to go the fusion route, you can set up a Watch Events Webhook filtering for new tasks with a billing field having a value. Then you can have an update call to remove the value, and you should be all set.