Task planning: create, organize, and track tasks

Tasks in Beebole are independent planning entities — units of work that you schedule, assign, and track time on. A task is not a sub-element of a project: tasks live on their own Planning page, and linking a task to a project is optional. Use tasks to plan the work to be done, and let your team track time directly on them.

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How tasks relate to projects

Projects describe what hours are logged into; tasks describe the work to be done. The two are connected but independent:

• A task can exist without any project. You can plan, assign, and complete it entirely on the Planning page.
• A task can be linked to projects through its Projects attribute in the task detail panel.
• Time can be tracked on tasks directly, in the Tasks section of the timesheet.

For general work that isn’t planned as a task, track time on projects and subprojects instead.

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Plannings

Every task belongs to a planning — a separate board with its own statuses, its own level names for the hierarchy, and its own mode: tasks or bookings. New Beebole accounts start with one planning named Main plan, with the statuses Backlog, Queue, In progress, and Done.

• Switch plannings — Click the planning name at the top of the Planning page and pick another one from the menu.
• Create a planning — In the same menu, type a name in the Name of a new planning field and click Add. The new planning opens in the mode you last picked, Bookings by default — see Tasks or bookings.
• Open a planning’s settings — Click the settings button next to the planning name (its tooltip reads Main plan settings for the Main plan planning). The dialog holds the planning’s mode and its statuses. The button only appears if you are allowed to manage tasks.

Statuses always belong to a planning, not to a project: each planning defines its own workflow. See Statuses below.

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Tasks or bookings

Each planning in Beebole holds one kind of item. A Tasks planning is a list of things to do — a to-do list, issues, tickets — where every item has a name of its own and a status. A Bookings planning puts people on projects: each item is a person booked on a project over a date range, at an allocation. The choice belongs to the planning, not to the view: Gantt, Kanban, List, and Staffing stay available on every planning, so you can look at the same data either way. To choose, open the planning’s settings and pick a mode under What this planning holds: A planning you add from the plannings menu opens in the mode you last picked under What this planning holds, whichever planning you picked it on. If you have never picked one, it opens in Bookings. Beebole remembers this last pick for each person separately. Existing plannings keep their mode: the Main plan of a new account, plannings created before this setting existed, and plannings created by an Asana, Linear, or Monday import are Tasks until you switch them. The mode decides what the add button opens and whether items carry a name of their own:

• In a Tasks planning, the add button reads Add Task and opens the name-and-status form described in Creating a task. In a Bookings planning, it reads Add Booking and asks for the person (Select the owner) and the project (one of the two is enough), a date range, the planned time, and the allocation (%, h/day, or Total). The planned time is filled in from the person’s work schedule, and you can change it. See Adding a booking without dragging for the details of this form.
• A booking is named after its project and person, everywhere it appears, and cannot be renamed: clicking its name shows A booking is named after its project and person. Time is not recorded on a booking either: it goes on the project instead. In a Tasks planning, you name each task yourself.
• In the Gantt and List views, each + button on a row or a group header follows the mode. In a Tasks planning, a plain click opens a name field in place, and the new task gets the row as its parent or the group’s owner, status, or project (see Adding tasks in place). In a Bookings planning, every + opens the Add Booking form with the row’s task as parent, or with the group’s person, project, or status, already filled in.
• On the Kanban board, the + in a column header opens an add card at the foot of that column in both modes. In a Tasks planning, the card asks for a name. In a Bookings planning, it asks for the person or the project, the period, and the allocation. See Adding cards to a column.
• On the Staffing timeline, a drag opens an editor right on the timeline, over the dates you drew. In a Bookings planning, the booking is saved as soon as you pick a person or a project for it. In a Tasks planning, the editor asks for the task’s name, then for the owner, projects, tags, and Planned time the planning uses, starting from the row’s person or project, and nothing is saved until you name the task and press Enter or pick a value. See Creating a booking and Creating a task on the timeline.

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Creating a task

A new task doesn’t get a color of its own. It takes the color of its project, its owner, or its parent task, and shows that same color everywhere it appears — badges, dots, timesheet section headers, timers, and mentions. Pick a color on the task itself only when you want it to stand apart from the work it belongs to.

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Adding tasks in place

In the Gantt and List views, you can name new tasks right in the task list, without opening the add form:

• To add a subtask, hover over a task’s row and click the + button next to its name. A name field opens under that row.
• To add a task to a group, hover over the group header of a grouped view and click its + button (Add Task). The name field opens at the top of the group, and the new task gets the group’s owner, status, or project.

Type the name and press Enter: the task is saved and an empty field opens for the next one. Leaving the field also saves what you typed, while Esc or the ✕ at the end of the field closes it without saving. No side panel opens: the new tasks appear in the view, ready to be opened for their dates, owner, and other details. A task added outside a status group gets the planning’s first status. To add several tasks at once, paste a list into the field: one name per line, with indented lines becoming subtasks of the line above, or a single line of names separated by semicolons. The field’s tooltip says the same: Enter a name or paste a list (one per line or separated by ;). Hold ⌘ (Ctrl on Windows) when you click a + to open the full add form instead, with the same parent, owner, status, or project already filled in. The + buttons only appear if you are allowed to manage tasks. In the Gantt and List views, they always open the Add Booking form in a Bookings planning, since a booking has no name to type. On the Kanban board, the + in a column header opens an add card at the foot of that column. Type a name and press Enter to add task after task in that column’s status, or paste a list the same way. The card also shows the fields the planning uses (the dates and Planned time, the owner, the projects, and the tags), and it fills in the owner, project, or tag the board is filtered on. When it shows those fields, the task is created as soon as it has a name and you press Enter or pick a value, and Add another starts the next one. In a Bookings planning, the card asks for the person or the project instead of a name. ⌘+Click on the + opens the full add form, as its tooltip says: ⌘+Click to open the form.

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Adding many tasks at once

You can import a whole task list by pasting it from a spreadsheet — there is no file upload involved. Imported tasks get the status selected in the add form. After the import you can click Undo to remove everything you just added, or New import to paste another batch. In a planning set to Bookings, the button reads Add Booking and opens the booking form instead of the name-and-status form — see Tasks or bookings.

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Task statuses

Statuses are the steps of a planning’s workflow — the same statuses that form the columns of the Kanban board. To edit them, open the planning’s settings dialog, which lists them under Task statuses:

• At the top of the Planning page, click the settings button next to the planning name.
• On the Kanban board, click a column’s name.

In the modal you can:

• Add a status — Type its name in the Add new status field and confirm.
• Rename or recolor a status — Click a status to edit its name or pick a new color.
• Reorder statuses — Drag a status up or down. The order defines the column order on the Kanban board.
• Limit a status — Set Max tasks to cap how many tasks the status can hold. See WIP limits.
• Delete a status — Only possible when the status holds no tasks (including tasks marked done). Every planning must keep at least one status.

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Assigning tasks

Beebole distinguishes the person responsible for a task from the people it is available to:

• Owner — The single person doing the task. Pick them in the task detail panel (Select the owner); a task can only have one owner. Next to the owner you can set % FTE, the share of their working time dedicated to the task — Beebole uses the owner’s work schedule and this percentage when fitting planned time between the task’s dates. Under the owner, Tentative marks the assignment as not confirmed yet: the task reserves the owner’s capacity but stays out of reports until you switch it off, as for tentative bookings.
• Potential owners — People or tags the task is assigned to. In filters, these appear as Potential owner and Potential owner tag.

Task managers are named in the Managed by section of the task panel, and managing a task covers its subtasks too. A person can also manage a whole planning, picked in the Manages section of their profile, and the managers of a tag manage the tasks tagged with it. Task managers can record time for others on the tasks they manage when their role allows it, and they approve timesheets in approval stages of type Task managers (see approver types).

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Subtasks and hierarchy

Tasks nest into subtasks, as deep as your plan requires. The hierarchy is shared by all views.

• To create a subtask, hover over the task’s row in the Gantt or List view and click the + button next to its name (see Adding tasks in place), or select the task and press ⌘+A to open the add form for a subtask.
• To indent or outdent with the keyboard, select a task in the Gantt or List view and press Tab to make it a subtask of the task above it, or Shift+Tab to move it up one level.
• To move a task under a different parent, hover over the breadcrumb above the task’s name (in the detail panel or on a Kanban card), click the edit button (Change parent), and pick the new parent with Choose a task. The list only offers tasks from the same planning.
• To expand or collapse a parent task, click the chevron next to it. ⌘+Click the chevron to expand or collapse all.

A parent task rolls up its children: it shows the period spanned by its subtasks and their total Planned in hours, read-only.

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Scheduling dates and planned time

Open a task’s detail panel to set its schedule:

• Dates — Pick the start and end dates with the date-range picker. A task runs over whole days by default; uncheck All day to give it exact start and end times instead — see giving a task hours.
• Planned in hours / Planned in days — Enter the planned amount of work. Next to the value, a pill shows the capacity the owner’s schedule leaves between the task’s dates; hover it to read the planned time against that capacity.
• Date locks — Lock buttons flank the date picker (Lock start date and Lock end date). One edge is locked at a time — the start by default. When planned time no longer fits between the dates, Beebole moves the unlocked edge: with the end date locked, the start moves earlier; with the start locked, the end extends. When planned time overflows the period, the pill turns red and grows two arrows: the down arrow cuts the planned time to what the period holds (its tooltip names both figures, as in Reduce 12h to 8h), and the up arrow moves the unlocked edge out to fit the planned time (its tooltip names the new date, as in Change end date to 12 Mar 2026).

These date locks only decide which edge moves. They don’t protect a task from changes. Planning has no lock date of its own, and the Lock date in Timesheet and Planning Settings freezes time records only, so tasks and bookings in a locked period stay editable. Below the planned time, check Plan on non-working days to make weekends and public holidays count as working days for the task. The task then keeps the dates you give it instead of moving to the next working day. The owner’s absences stay non-working. A parent task has no such checkbox, since its dates come from its subtasks. If the owner already has another task with planned time in the same period, the panel shows an Overlapping tasks causing overload warning so you can rebalance. To sequence tasks — making one start after another ends — use dependencies in the Gantt chart.

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Tracking time on tasks

Time entries can be recorded directly against tasks:

• From the timesheet — People add rows in the Tasks section of their timesheet and log hours on a task, just like on a project. Tasks someone owns are listed first in the add-task picker, so their own work is quickest to reach.
• From a suggestion — A dated task assigned to someone reaches them as a suggested entry rather than being added to their timesheet as a row automatically. Accepting the suggestion creates the entry and pins the row. The exception is the Allow only planned tasks in the timesheet restriction: when it is on, the tasks a person owns appear in their timesheet on their own, from every planning, and time can be entered only on those tasks and only within each task’s planned dates.
• From a Kanban card — Hover over a card and click the clock button (Add time) to log time on that task for today. Once time is logged, the card shows a pill with the logged total next to the planned time, in hours (for example 4 / 8). See Kanban board.

Which plannings accept time entries is controlled by the Record time on these plannings setting, in the Categories tab of Timesheet and Planning Settings. Tasks in other plannings don’t show the time button. You can also let task statuses drive time records with Auto Timesheet from Planning. Choose a Start and an End status per planning: moving a task into those statuses starts and ends its time records as suggested entries, which the person accepts in their timesheet. A status move never writes an entry into the timesheet directly. Set it up in the Auto Timesheet from Planning tab.

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Descriptions, custom fields, and tags

Beyond scheduling, each task carries:

• Description — A rich-text panel for context, acceptance criteria, links, and file attachments, with @mentions to reference teammates. See task descriptions for the editor’s features.
• Custom fields — Organization-defined fields (text, numbers, dates, URLs, booleans) that appear in the task detail panel. Define them in Settings > Custom Fields and make them visible for tasks — visibility can even be limited to specific plannings. See Custom fields.
• Tags — Label tasks with tags to group and filter them across categories, and to report on them by team, client, or any dimension you define.

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Marking tasks done and deleting them

Each task has a ⋯ action menu (hover over its row in the Gantt or List view, or over its Kanban card) with Duplicate, Rename, Done, Reopen, and Delete. Done takes a finished task out of the planning views. The task keeps its data and its time records, and the hours logged on it still count in reports. When a planning holds done tasks, the page header shows Show Done with their number: click it to bring them back into the views, and click Hide Done to hide them again. To restore a task, show the done tasks and click Reopen in its menu. You can also mark tasks done from these places:

• The button before each task’s name in the List view: Done, or Reopen on a task already done. Only Delete stays at the end of the row.
• A Kanban column’s ⋯ menu, for every task in the column or only the selected cards (see Kanban board).
• Set as done in the menu of a task row in the timesheet, for people allowed to manage tasks.

The task’s history records each of these changes as Done or Reopened. When a submitted timesheet holds time on a task marked done, the approval review flags it as Time on a task marked done. Delete removes the task permanently. A toast appears with an Undo button right after deletion.

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Viewing tasks your way

The Planning page shows your tasks through saved views — tabs above the task list. Click Add a view and pick Gantt chart, Kanban, Staffing, or List; each view remembers its own settings (columns, grouping, period, sort, or card fields). Drag a tab sideways to put the views in the order you want. When a Gantt or Staffing view is locked to a fixed Period, the period selector sits on the left, before the tabs. Use the Filters button to narrow any view by task, status, owner, potential owner, project, or tags — the button shows the active filter count, and toggling it off keeps the filters for later.

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Frequently asked questions