Is there a way to automate tasks' due dates to be calculated backward from a deal's "Delivery Date"?

SecondFlatiron

Hi there,

I'm combining deals, projects, and tasks within projects to represent an event delivery workflow. However, most tasks related to events don't really depend on when you start working on a project (E.G. "Banquet Orders") of the event, but instead are best built backwards from the event delivery date, as there are typical deadline structures.

Under the deal (the Event), I have added the custom field of "Delivery Date", which could also be thought of as when we arrive onsite and the event begins.

Ideally, whenever I add a project to an existing deal, the tasks from my template project backfill to let me know of deadlines.

Here's the desired output:

1. Create deal (event), add Delivery Date
2. Place project ("Banquet Orders") within deal
3. Task deadlines within the "Banquet Orders" project automatically update. Task "Sign Final Contract", for example, would have a calculated due date of 7 days (not including weekends) before the Delivery Date.

Is this possible via automation, or is there a different setting?

Thank you!

Andreia Costa

Hi @SecondFlatiron 👋

There's some great feedback here that I'd like, if possible, for you to share it in the "Ideas and Product Feedback" section, mainly:
- The need to be able to work with project tasks in Automations

The main issue here is exactly the fact that we can't pick tasks with automations and if that's not possible, then we can't add the date you want. I will leave here a suggestion in the hopes it can help you!

From what I gathered from your comment, this would be possible with 1 automation:
1- Deal updated where the condition is a custom field (date type). Once that deal is updated with a date, it would trigger a project being created with a start date the same as the date added in the custom field. So you would pick that custom field in the Start date section:

2- After that section, you could select a "project update" trigger, where the tasks would be updated with a date equal to the start date (this is what is not possible right now). But if we create a project and then use the Project templates feature, we can specify that each task should be created X days after the start date:

I hope this helps!