Argyle organizes our all-star contractors under Projects in the Argyle Interactive asana team.
These contractor projects provide easy access to all of a contractors tasks, and can be billed for accordingly using Everhour.
This is made possible thanks to our nifty Zapier Auto-assigner!
What Project Owners Need to Know:
- Fill out all task details (to the best of your ability) before tagging as “billable” or assigning to a contractor
- Ensure the assignee is set to a contractor
- Add a billable tag to trigger this automation
- Doing the above will ensure this runs smoothly!
How it works:
- Project owner creates a task in a client project, then assigns the task to the contractor
- During task creation, they ascribe a “billable” tag to the task (this triggers the automation!)
- After 30 mins, the Zapier Auto-assigner moves the task to the respective contractor’s project.
This ensures billable tasks are automatically sent to contractors. The 30min delay ensures the task is created with full details for the contractor to begin work!
Now, let’s take a dive into the Zapier Asana Auto-assigner, and how to add a new contractor to the system!
First, let’s put a filter in place to only run the following steps if we have actually assigned a task to a contractor. We’ll add multiple OR conditions to a Zapier Filter step, and do a simple “text contains” match with our Contractor’s asana names. This prevents the process from running for all tasks assigned to anyone – we just want this to run for Contractors.
Using the Asana API Explorer (legacy) we can find all users in Argyle’s Asana Organization.
We’ll need these values for the auto assigner’s step “Match Assignee ID to Contractor Project ID”
The “Match Assignee ID to Contractor Project ID” is a lookup table which looks at the tasks assignee ID field (Lookup Key), and looks at a matching value in the below table. The column to the right of the matching value is the Contractor’s Asana Project ID. These can be found using the API explorer, but it is also the first string of numbers in the asana project url.
We’ll take the output of this step, and use it in the “Add Task to a Section in a Project” step. The section is not required, so we just need to fill out the workspace (argyleinteractive.com) Task ID (using the existing task ID from step 1) and the project ID that we matched with earlier, in the “Match Assignee ID to Contractor Project ID” step.