Effective task management is crucial for businesses handling multiple projects. The recurring task feature helps businesses simplify repetitive activities, ensuring timely execution and reducing manual effort.
What is a recurring task?
Recurring tasks are activities that repeat at regular intervals, such as weekly meetings, monthly reports, or periodic maintenance activities. Instead of manually recreating the same tasks each time, Odoo 18 allows users to automate the process, saving time and ensuring consistency.
Before setting up recurring tasks, ensure that the feature is enabled in the Project module. For that navigate to Project > Configuration > Settings.
Under the Tasks Management section, enable the Recurring Tasks option and click on the Save button to save the changes. Enabling this feature auto-generates the repetitive regular activities task.
Once the feature is enabled, recurring tasks can be created. For that, select a relevant project from the dashboard of the Project module or click on the New button to create a new project.
A Create a Project wizard appears. In the form, enter the project name in the Name field. Enable the Timesheet option to track time spent on tasks and activate the Billable option to allow invoicing for time and materials. Assign a customer to the project so that billable time and materials can be charged accordingly. Specify an email alias in the Create tasks by sending an email to the field to enable automatic task creation when emails are sent to the designated alias.
When the Create Project button is clicked, a new page appears where the task stages can be added by providing the stage name in the provided field and then clicking on the Add.
After adding stages to the project, now the tasks can be added under those stages. For that, click on the + icon available for each stage to add the task under that particular stage or click on the New button to add a task to the first stage.
After adding all the required tasks, let's say the task ‘Monthly Security Audit’ needs to be repeated every month. So, instead of creating a new task for that each month, this task can be configured as a recurring task.
Configuring a Recurring Task
Select the task ‘Monthly Security Audit, ’ which needs to be set as a recurring task, in the task form, there is a field called Deadline, and adjacent to that field there is a recurrent icon, as shown in the image below.
When the recurring icon is clicked, an additional field called Repeat Every appears. This field allows you to define the interval at which the task should repeat (e.g., days, weeks, months, years). Additionally, a field is provided, where users can either set the task to repeat forever or specify an end date. If the Until option is selected, a date field appears, enabling users to define the last occurrence of the recurring task.
Now add the rest of the details for the task, like the Customer, if any, the Deadline of the project can be set, Allocated Time for the project, Tags, and Milestone can also be provided for the task. Add the timesheet for the task in the timesheets tab.
Also, a Recurring Tasks smart tab can be seen where the task that has been set as the recurring task can be viewed along with the stage in which the task is currently in, The Assignees of the task, and if any time has been logged to the recurring task it can be viewed in the Time Spent field, also according to the time spent the Progress of the task will also be displayed. If any activities have to be set for the task they can be done as well by clicking on the clock icon under the Next Activity. Tags that have been added for the task can also be seen from here.
When the task is complete, the status of the task can be changed from In Progress to Done. As soon as the task is set to Done state, another recurring task will be created, and in the smart tab, it will show two.
The second recurring task will be created as soon as the first one is completed or canceled. Also, the recurrent task will be created in the first stage, and the details such as the customer, tags, assignee, and allocated time will be the same for the new task.
The details, such as the milestone, timesheet, chatter, activities, and sub-tasks, will not be copied from the previous task. To edit the recurrent task, open the latest recurrent tasks and make the necessary edits, which will be applied to all future tasks as well. To stop the recurrence, go to the latest task and click on the recurrent icon so that the recurrence will stop.
This is how the recurrent task can be configured in the Odoo 18 Project module. Odoo 18 simplifies recurring task management by allowing users to automate task creation based on defined intervals. Users can set a recurrence frequency, specify an end date, or let tasks repeat indefinitely. However, tasks stop recurring once the deadline is reached or if the recurrence rule is misconfigured. Ensuring proper settings and scheduled actions are active helps maintain seamless task automation.
To read more about How to Manage Task Recurrence With Odoo 16 Project App, refer to our blog How to Manage Task Recurrence With Odoo 16 Project App.