Tasks

Tasks are the to-dos that you and your users have to complete. In Zoho Billing, you can create, assign different tasks to your users, mark them with priority, and send reminders before the due date using Tasks.

Scenario: Patricia, the manager of Zylker wants one of her subordinates, Brandon, to follow-up on an invoice by calling the customer two days before the due date. So, she creates a task for that particular invoice and assigns it to Brandon, marks the due date as the date on which the invoice is due and sets a reminder two days before the due date. Brandon receives an email notifying him that this task has been assigned to him. He also gets a reminder two days before the due date reminding him to make the follow-up call.

Benefit of Tasks

With the Tasks feature, you can seamlessly communicate about various to-dos within the organisation. Some of the benefits are:

Mark tasks based on priority like high, low, normal, etc.
Set reminders to send notifications about a task through email, in-app notification, or both.
Notify users about the tasks via email.
Create custom statuses and mark the tasks based on the status.
Create tasks associated with transactions and view them in the transaction details page.

Enable Tasks

Tasks will not be available in Zoho Billing by default. You will have to enable it for your organisation. Here’s how:

Go to Settings on the top right corner of the page.
Select General under Setup & Configurations.
Check the Tasks option.
Click Save.

Tasks will be included inside the widgets pane on the right.

Create a Task

Prerequisite: Ensure that you've provided all your users with the required access from the Users and Roles settings.

Once you have enabled tasks and given your users the required permissions in your organisation, you can create tasks and assign them to users. Here’s how:

Create Tasks From Widgets Pane

You can create a task by clicking the Task icon on the widgets pane of any page. The task created from here will not be associated to specific record.

Create Tasks for a Specific Record

You can associate a task with a particular record by going to the record and clicking the Task icon.

You can only associate tasks for records from the following modules:

Items
Customers
Invoices
Credit Notes
Expenses
Projects

Here’s how you create a task:

If you are creating a task from the widgets pane, you can choose Create Task, or choose Import Tasks to import.
If you are creating a task for a specific record:
- Go to the respective module in which the record is present.
- Select the record for which you want to create a task and click on the Task icon present inside the widgets pane.
- Click + New Task to create a new task.

In the New Task page, enter the necessary details.

Field	Description
Title	Enter the title or name of the task.
Assign to	Select the user to whom you want to assign the task.
Notify user via email	Mark this option if you wish to notify the user about the task through email.
Related Contact	Add the contact you want to associate with this task.
Due Date	Select the date on which you expect the task to be completed.
Priority	Choose the priority of the task. You can choose if it’s a very high, high, normal, low, or very low priority task.
Set Reminder	Set reminders and choose to send them via email, in-app notification, or both to the assigned user.

Click Save.

On clicking save, the task will be created and if you had marked the Notify user via email option, the users associated with the task will receive an email with the task details.

Users can track the percentage of completion and update statuses such as Completed or In Progress from the Change Status dropdown.

Task Preferences

Task Completion Notification

You can set notification preferences at the organisation level for users associated with a task. Select the Notify users once the status is changed to Completed option to send them an email and an in-app notification when the task is marked as Completed.

Set Reminder Notification

You can set a default reminder type and specify how long before the due date the reminder should be sent. This will apply to all tasks you create, but you can change it while creating or editing a task.

Check the Set the default preference for reminder option.
Then, configure how alerts should be sent to users by selecting your preferred Alert Type:
- Select Email to receive only email notifications.
- Select In-app Notification to receive the notification only within the app.
- Select Both Email & In-app Notification to receive both email and in-app notifications.
In the Remind Before field, enter how many days, months, or years before the due date the notification should be sent to users.
Click Save.

Custom Status

Insight: Only the admins, the assigned user, or the user who created the task will have permission to change the status of a task.

There are predefined statuses in tasks such as Yet to Start, In Progress and Completed. However, if you wish to create other statuses, you can do it by creating a custom status. These custom statuses will have to be created as a sub-status of a predefined status. Here’s how:

Go to Settings on the top right corner of the page.
Select Tasks under Module Settings.
Click the + New Custom Status button on the top right corner of the page.
Select the status under which you want to create this sub-status and enter the Status Name.
Click Save.

Note:If you create a sub-status under Completed, and apply the sub-status on a task, no notifications will be sent as it will be considered as completed.

Manage Permissions

You can choose the level of permission you wish to give your users. By default, only the admin will have full access. Admins will have to provide access to other users, only after which they’ll be able to see the tasks assigned to them. To grant access:

Go to Settings on the top right corner of the page.
Select Roles under Users and Roles.
Select the role that you want to set the permission for.
You can give full access, view, create, delete, or edit access.
If you wish to give a user access to other users’ tasks, click More Permissions and check the Manage other users’ tasks option.

Insight: If a user is given a permission, for example, View permission, then they can only view the tasks assigned to them. However, if the user is given both View and Manage other users' tasks, they can view other users' tasks as well. This applies to all permissions such as View, Create, Edit, and Delete under the Tasks header in the Users and Roles section.

Other Actions

Note: Only admins, the assigned user, the user who created the task, and anyone with the Manage other users' tasks permission will be able to delete or edit the task.

Delete a Task

Warning: Once you delete a task, you will not be able to retrieve it.

Navigate to the widgets pane on the right.
Click the Tasks icon.
Click the down arrow next to the task that you want to delete.
Click Delete.
In the pop-up, click Delete Task to confirm.

Edit a Task

Navigate to the widgets pane on the right.
Click the Tasks icon.
Click the down arrow next to the task that you want to edit.
Click Edit.
Make the necessary changes and click Save.

Manage Filters

If you want to view tasks based on their status, you can filter them. Here’s how:

Navigate to the widgets page on the right and click on the Tasks icon.
Click All Tasks at the top of the page and select the status you want to filter by. The tasks will be displayed based on the filter you’ve applied.

Bulk Actions

Warning: You cannot undo a bulk update once it has been performed.

You can bulk-delete and bulk-update the tasks that you’ve created in Zoho Billing. Here’s how:

Navigate to the widgets page on the right and click on the Tasks icon.
Select the tasks that you want to update or delete.
Click Bulk Update and choose a field from the dropdown to update with new information.
Click Update to complete the bulk update.
To delete tasks, click the Delete icon and then OK.