Tutorial: How to create a Manual Automation with Subtasks
A brief walkthrough of generating a task with subtasks.
If you would like to quickly add a task with a number of subtasks for a specific workflow, you can do that by creating a manual automation. This quick text walkthrough will show you how.
Building a manual automation means that you have a pre-built task or collection of tasks that you can add to a matter when you want to, and any task can have subtasks attached.
You would do this by navigating on the sidebar to Settings> Customization > Automation
Build the Automation
1. On the top right, select add automation.
2. For "Board" choose "Manual Automation" if it is not already selected.
3. Name your automation.
4. Under trigger, select "manually"
5. Do not add any rules.
6. Under "DO This.." Action, select "Create Task" - This will be your parent task, so name this accordingly under "Task Title"
7. For Due date - you can choose for the due date to be calculated based on the date you add this to your matter or you can set the date to be calculated based on an input you provide when you create the task on your matter (for example, if you have a client meeting or a court-date scheduled, you can have a manual automation set up to calculate various tasks and due dates counting back from the known date of the hearing).
8. The number you add below this choice will calculate the date in calendar (not yet business) days. If you add a "-" the due date will be calculated in negative days.
9. Set up any other conditions you would like to add (teams are a way to group tasks across matters, and labels are an organizational tool).
10. Finally, for your subtasks / checklist items click "Add Subtask" and Add any subtasks you'd like.
Note: Currently, subtasks added here cannot have all of their settings pre-built like full tasks. However, you can "add action" below the task you've just created to add as many full tasks as you would like. We are considering the best way to add subtask customization to automation. The limitation is currently based on the way dates are calculated automatically and changeable at the time the automation is run. You can still manually set due dates, assign users and add to your subtasks once they have been created in your matter.
The final result will look like this:
Run your Automation
From your Matter page, on the top right of the screen click "Add New" > Automation
You will be presented with a list of all of your Manual automations. Select the one you would like to run.
You will see a pre-run window containing your automation:
Importantly, from this screen you can select a launch date. This date will impact the "Due Date" of any primary tasks. In this example, there is only one parent task associated with this automation. If you had several, or also had an event triggered, above the purple "run automation button" the other tasks would appear as tabs, like so:
This "Pre-run" screen, let's you make any changes to your automation and confirm that it will populate the way you want. That means from here, you can add a description to your tasks, manually change the due date or statuses for any tasks, change user assignments, add additional checklist items or checklist groups, or take any other actions you might want on any of the primary tasks.
If you do nothing, the automation will run exactly as you'd programmed it.
When your set, press "Run automation"
The tasks and any subtasks will be created, by default, in the "inbox" column of your matter.
Important Note for Clio Users: Just like checklist items and subtasks you create manually while performing your work, Subtasks and checklist items will Not sync with Clio. Only the primary parent tasks will sync. Subtasks and checklists are one of the extensions Dendri offers to improve your task workflows, and is not a feature with a direct parallel in Clio.
And that's it. now you can work with your tasks.
Using this set up, you can create a complex or simple a set of tasks to populate with as little as three clicks.
