Assignments

Overview

An assignment hands work out to your team. It is how you give the same checklist to twelve locations every morning, or to every shift manager once a week.

Use an assignment when you need to reach more than one person, repeat the work on a schedule, or track who has and has not done it. For a one-off job for one person, a quick task is faster.

	Assignments	Quick Tasks
Best for	Recurring or bulk work	One-off work
Recipients	Multiple users, locations, teams, or roles	Single user OR single location
Scheduling	One-time, recurring (daily, weekly, monthly), or no due date	One-time with optional due date
Reporting	Completion rates and scheduled reports	Not included in assignment reports

---

Creating an Assignment

Video walkthrough · 2:42Create recurring assignmentsRecipients by team and role, on a recurring schedule

Walkthrough of “Creating an Assignment”

Who can do thisOwnerAdminManager

The process of creating an assignment involves choosing what to assign, selecting recipients, setting a schedule, and configuring settings.

Choose What to Assign

The first step is to decide whether you want to assign a Form or a Simple Task.

• Assigning a Form:
  • From the Assignments page, click Create and choose Form.
  • Provide a custom Assignment Name. If left blank, it will use the form’s name.
  • Select the Form you want to assign from the dropdown menu.
• Assigning a Simple Task:
  • From the Assignments page, click Create and choose Simple Task.
  • Enter a clear, descriptive Task Name.
  • Provide detailed Task Instructions.
  • Configure Photo Requirements:
    • Require Photos: Check this box to require that photos be taken for the task.
    • Camera Only (No Uploads): If photos are required, you can check this box to force users to take a new photo with their camera, rather than uploading an existing one.

Select Recipients

Next, decide who will receive the assignment. You can assign to recipients in four primary ways:

• Assign to Specific Users: Assign directly to one or more individual users.
• Assign to Specific Locations: Assign to one or more physical locations. The assignment can be completed by any user at that location.
• Assign to Users by Team/Role: This mode lets you assign to all users who are under specific teams AND have specific roles.
• Assign to Locations by Team/Attribute: This mode lets you assign to all locations that are under specific teams AND have specific attributes.
  • You can further restrict who can submit via the “Can be submitted by role” option

Note

• If “Can be submitted by role” is not specified, all users under the location can submit the assignment.
• You can only assign to users or locations that are on your team/location or under your team in the hierarchy

Set the Schedule

Choose whether the assignment repeats, and when the work is due.

• Due Date: one specific date and time.
• Recurring: the work comes back on a repeating schedule.
• No Due Date: the work stays open until it is completed.

How often it repeats

A recurring assignment repeats daily, weekly or monthly, with an interval and a start date. An end date is optional; without one it repeats until you end it.

Repeats	What you choose	How often
Daily	Nothing further	Every 1–365 days
Weekly	One or more weekdays	Every 1–52 weeks
Monthly	A day of the month, or an ordinal weekday	Every 1–12 months

A monthly schedule works one of two ways: by day of the month (the 1st through the 31st, or last), or by ordinal weekday — the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or last of a given day, where the day can be a specific weekday or the looser Weekday or Weekend.

For month-end work, choose last rather than the 31st. A schedule set to the 31st has nothing to land on in a short month.

When each occurrence is due

Repeating says when the work appears. The due date says how long people have to do it once it has appeared, and it is set relative to that occurrence rather than to a fixed date on the calendar.

You can give people a fixed amount of time — up to 24 hours, 7 days or 4 weeks — or use one of these:

• End Of Day, End Of Week, End Of Month — due at the end of whichever day, week or month the work appeared in.
• Next Recurrence — due when the following occurrence appears. On a daily opening checklist, that means each day’s checklist is due when tomorrow’s arrives.

So a weekly assignment set to End Of Week is due at the end of the week it landed in, every time, without you setting a date. Minutes on a due time must be a multiple of 15, and End Of Week cannot be used when a weekly schedule has more than one weekday selected, because several occurrences would collapse onto one deadline.

Tip

Click Preview when creating a recurring assignment to see the first four scheduled dates. This is the quickest way to check a monthly pattern does what you expect.

Which timezone is used

For an assignment given to locations, each location’s own timezone decides when the work lands and when it is due. The timezone set here is ignored for those locations. For an assignment given to users, the timezone set here is used.

Assign a task to twenty locations across four timezones, due at 9:00 AM, and each location gets it at 9:00 AM its own local time — four different moments spread across the day. That is usually what you want, but it means completion rates lag in the timezones that have not reached the deadline yet, and an assignment report only sends once the last timezone has been processed.

It also explains a confusing error. When you create an assignment, WorkWizard rejects a due date that has already passed — and for a location assignment it checks every location, refusing the whole thing if the date is already past for even one of them. A 9:00 AM due date created at 10:00 AM Eastern fails because of a location further ahead, even though the rest are fine. Push the due date out, or start the schedule the following day.

Note

Scheduled reports and reminders repeat on the same kind of schedule, but they have no due date — they simply send when they come round. Due dates belong to assignments, because only assignments create work someone has to finish. Each carries its own timezone, so changing an assignment’s timezone does not move a report attached to it.

Configure Settings

The final step is to configure additional settings for the assignment.

• Project: (Optional) Assign this assignment to a project to group it with other related assignments.
• Late Submissions:
  • Allow Late Submissions: Check this box to allow users to submit after the due date.
    • If disabled, the assignment will be marked as Expired after the due date and can no longer be submitted.
  • Grace Period: If late submissions are allowed, you can specify a grace period (e.g., allow up to 2 days past the due date).
• Other Settings:
  • Allow Others to Submit: If checked, anyone with the required role can submit the form, not just the assigned user.
  • Notifications: Add one or more notification rules. See Reminder Notifications below.

Reminder Notifications

An assignment carries a list of notification rules, and each rule fires on its own. This is how you chase work before it is late, not only report it after the fact.

Each rule has:

• Timing — one of:
  • Before Due — fires ahead of the deadline, by the interval you set.
  • After Due — fires once the deadline has passed, by the interval you set.
  • On Completion — fires when the work is submitted. No interval applies.
• Duration — a number and a unit (minutes, hours, days, weeks or months), shown only for Before Due and After Due.
• Notify Roles — the roles that should hear about it.
• Notify Assignee — whether the person the work belongs to is also notified.

A common setup is two rules: one Before Due by 1 day with Notify Assignee ticked, to prompt the person doing the work, and one After Due by 2 hours notifying the manager role, so an escalation only reaches a manager once the deadline has genuinely been missed.

Note

The timing is measured against the due date in the location’s own timezone for a location assignment. A “1 day before due” rule on an assignment spanning several timezones therefore fires at a different moment for each location — see Which timezone is used.

Assignment notification emails are always delivered, even to someone who has turned assignment emails off in their profile. See Notifications you cannot turn off.

---

Assignment Reports

Who can do thisOwnerAdminManager

You can schedule a report for an assignment that you have created (or others if you are an admin). Assignment reports will process either on recurrence, when due, or when expired.

Options are the same as Scheduling a Report except recurrence is replaced with:

• When: Choose when the report will be generated. Options include:
  • On Recurring: The report will be generated when the assignment recurs.
  • On Due: The report will be generated when the assignment is due. (Will only be available if not due next recurrence)
  • On Expire: The report will be generated when the assignment expires. (Will only be available if late submissions are allowed and a late interval is set)

You can also view a report for the assignment on the assignment page by clicking the “Report” tab.

---

Managing Existing Assignments

Assignments Created by Triggers

Some assignments are created automatically by a trigger rather than by hand.

1. Go to the Assignments page.
2. Click the Triggers tab to see them, each with its completion rate.
3. Click the one you want to look at.

Filtering the List

• Status: show only assignments in a particular state.
• Date: 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, or all.

Remembering Your Filters

Your filter selections are remembered on the device you are using, so a list you filter stays filtered the next time you open it, including after refreshing the page or reopening the app. This applies across the app wherever the Filters button appears, such as assignments, tasks, form templates and the audit log. Each list remembers its own selections separately.

• Search text is not remembered, only the filters shown as chips next to the Filters button.
• Opening a link that already carries its own filters (for example, from a notification or a dashboard) shows those filters instead of your remembered ones.
• Use Clear all to reset a list back to no filters.
• Your remembered filters are cleared when you log out.

Editing an Assignment

Who can do thisOwnerAdminManager

You can edit assignments you created, and managers under you can edit theirs.

1. Go to the Assignments page.
2. Click the dots (…) next to the assignment and click Edit.
3. Make your changes and click Save.

Anyone you add gets the current occurrence straight away, and is notified. People who already have this occurrence — finished, late, awaiting approval or rejected — are skipped, so nobody is handed the same work twice.

You cannot change who an assignment goes to (people versus locations) after it is created, and an assignment sent down from Brand Center cannot be edited locally.

Manually Expiring Overdue Tasks

Who can do thisOwnerAdminManager

Closes out overdue work in bulk, so it stops counting against you.

1. Go to the Assignments page and click the assignment.
2. If anything is overdue, click Expire Overdue.
3. Confirm. Every overdue task becomes Expired.

Deleting an Assignment

Who can do thisOwnerAdminManager

1. Go to the Assignments page.
2. Click the dots (…) next to the assignment and click Delete.
3. Choose whether to also delete unfinished work.

Deleting removes the assignment and, unless you say otherwise, the work still outstanding. Completed submissions are always kept, so deleting an assignment never destroys your history or the reports built on it.

Ending a Recurring Assignment

Ending a schedule stops new work from being created but leaves what is already out there open.

1. Go to the Assignments page.
2. Click the dots (…) next to the assignment and click End.
3. Optionally choose to delete the current occurrence’s unfinished work.
4. Confirm.

Deleting the current occurrence gives you a clean break, which is what you want if you are about to set up a replacement assignment with different settings.

An assignment also ends by itself once its end date passes.

Note: End only appears on recurring assignments.

Being Notified of New Work

People get a notification on their phone when work is assigned to them, or to their location or team. Tapping it opens the task.

Reassigning Someone’s Work

Who can do thisOwnerAdminManager

1. Open the assignment.
2. Click the dots (…) next to the submission you want to move.
3. Click Reassign, choose the person, and click Reassign again.

Note: This only works for work assigned to a person, not to a location.