Task checklists

Introduction to checklists

Organising and running events and bookings can be challenging with so much to remember to do. Planning begins before the occasion - promotion and communication, team recruitment, practicalities like ensuring rooms and resources are booked and sorting out the shopping. There's also lots to do on the day itself - setting the room up just right, signage, guest welcome and check-in, serving refreshments and making sure the tech works. Then, finally, there are other tasks that happen after - follow-up communications, event debrief and thank yous to the team. For those managing life events like weddings and funerals, those to-do lists can seem endless.

To help with task management, the Calendar and Bookings modules include Checklist functionality enabling you to create and manage lists of tasks for an event or booking. Adding tasks is quick and easy. Tasks can be grouped into different checklists and re-ordered within a list. When adding a task, optionally add a comment for further explanation, set a due date and assign tasks to users. Tasks can be marked as "Done", whilst previously completed tasks can be reset to "To do". Helpfully, your team can stay on top of all their upcoming, due and overdue tasks through an event task and booking task widget on their Dashboard.

You can create ad hoc checklists for any event or booking but, as there is often a repetitive nature to planning and event management, we've also made it easy to add a previously-used checklist from another event or booking. You can even create checklist templates against event categories and booking types so that when you add events for that category or bookings for that type, the template checklist is automatically added.

Any user with at least Use permissions for the Calendar or Bookings module can add, edit and delete checklists and tasks for a respective event or booking, and mark tasks as Done or To Do.

Adding checklists and tasks

From an event or booking's "View" page, click into the Checklists tab and click Add checklist. Give the checklist a suitable Name, choose a Colour and click Save to complete the process.

There's no limit to the number of checklists you might create, enabling you to group related tasks. You can also change the checklist order by dragging the checklist headers. You're now ready to add tasks. Click Add task, begin typing the task name and press <Enter> to add the task. Added tasks can be re-ordered by dragging them into the preferred position.

You can optionally add additional task details - either by selecting Edit from the task Actions or by double-clicking a task name.

On the Edit task view, optionally add a Comment and set the Due date. In the example below, if the event date is later changed, the task due date will automatically change relatively to match. Tasks are styled within the list according to their status today - Overdue in red, Due in green. You can also choose a User to whom the task is Assigned. Assigned users are not notified of tasks, however, they do see all their task assignments in their Event Tasks and Booking Tasks dashboard widgets (see later in this article).

Ticking a task as completed moves it from the list on the To Do tab to the Done tab. Completed tasks can be un-done, which moves them back to the list on the To Do tab. Helpful tab counters give an at-a-glance view of task progress - ideal for long lists.

Adding template checklists for events and bookings

To help with the sometimes repetitive nature of creating checklists, these two templating methods will save you time.

The first, and where you already have a great checklist on another event or booking, is to use the Duplicate from action in the More actions menu on the Checklists tab...

...which opens a pop-up through which you can search and select the event or booking to duplicate from. You can even selectively choose which checklists to duplicate to the event or booking. This process will add all the selected checklists to the event or booking being viewed, without affecting any checklists you may have already added.

The second method is to create Template checklists against an event Category or booking Type; these will be automatically added to all new events or bookings for that category or type (although they can be later removed if they are not needed). Note that once a template checklist has been added to an event or booking it becomes detached from the original template and will not sync if further tasks are later added to the template. Similarly, a subsequent change to an event's category or a booking's type will not add the template checklists - but you can use the "Duplicate from" method described above.

When duplicating a checklist from an event or booking to another event or booking, any absolute due dates will be converted into relative due dates, relative to the date of the event or booking you are duplicating to. Similarly, when duplicating a checklist from an event template or booking template, any absolute due dates will be converted to relative days before/after the event/booking for the template.

Adding a Template checklist to an event Category or booking Type is the same as adding a checklist to an event or booking. Head into the Categories or Types section in the respective Calendar or Bookings module. In this example, we'll work with an event Category but the process is the same for Types.

From the Category "View" page, click on the Checklists tab to add checklists and tasks in the same manner as described in the last section.

Double-clicking or selecting to Edit a template task opens the task to edit, allowing the user to add an (optional) task Description, set a Due date and add an Assigned user. In this context, note how the Due date can be specified as days before or after the event or booking. In this way, the Due date will be correctly calculated relative to the date of the event or booking to which the template checklist is later added. And if the event of booking date later changes, the task Due date will also change relative to the change.

Managing tasks

Users can add task widgets to their Dashboards - there's a widget for Booking Tasks and another for Event Tasks. See the related support article for further information on customising a user's dashboard with widgets. Each widget shows due and upcoming tasks due for the next 7 days and all overdue tasks. Each widget has two views - My tasks - showing the user's assigned tasks - and Due tasks - showing upcoming and overdue tasks that are either unassigned or have been assigned to other users.

Note that each widget only displays tasks that have been assigned a due date.