Formula fields in Dashboard
planned
Eva Shapiro
Hello! Can I use formula fields too in my Dashboard, in such widgets like Bar chart, etc? Now I only can use money fields, but would really appreciate adding Formula fields too!
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Sigurd Seteklev
Hi!
This is now marked as Planned, but we have built support for formula fields in calculation cards and bar charts. We don't have 100% support yet, but that is planned. We have a lot of things in progress, so please keep posting on the parts you feel are missing and upvote and it'll help us prioritize based on your needs :)
Thank you!
R
Ronald Stevens
Yes, waiting for this since I know ClickUp, our company cannot change from Notion to Clickup without this option.
Rafael Bolandini
The minimum functionality that dashboards should have is simple calculations between numbers: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
If I have a sum in one calculation field that results in a positive value, and another calculation field where the sum results in a negative value, I need another calculation field that is simply the sum of the two calculation fields. This is very basic and we should have had it a long time ago; I hope they prioritize this.
Sigurd Seteklev
Rafael Bolandini: Thank you for your feedback. Don't disagree with this. You think the right way to go about this is a more advanced calculation card where you can do simple calculations on aggregated values?
Niklas Buschner
Sigurd Seteklev a great thing would be average of a custom number field based on a custom datetime field in a bar/line chart to see how the value develops over time
Mostafa Shabanpour
ClickUp performs very poorly when it comes to aggregate calculations. Imagine I have a project with a list containing 100 tasks. Now, as a project manager, I want to report how much of the project's workload has been completed. There are several ways in ClickUp to approximate this simple result, but none of them are complete.
For example, one approach is to create a numeric custom field where I manually enter the effort value for each task, then add a formula custom field to calculate what percentage each task's effort represents out of the total effort of all tasks in that list — so that I can later display this value to the client on a dashboard with a simple sum. But in practice, we get stuck right at this stage! Because ClickUp doesn't support vertical aggregation within a formula. In other words, I can't write a formula that takes a task's effort, gets the sum of all tasks' efforts in the list, divides one by the other, and places the percentage of that specific task's effort relative to the entire list in its cell. The only workaround is to hardcode the total sum of efforts as a static value in the formula — which obviously becomes invalid and useless the moment a new task is added or any task's effort value changes.
Now, let's say we accept manually entering the static sum of efforts. Then the next problem arises: there is no dashboard card other than the Calculation card that allows you to use formulas. For instance, suppose I want to show the client how much work remains in each status — say, 10% of the workload hasn't started yet, 30% is in progress, and 60% is completed. Such a capability simply doesn't exist in ClickUp.
This is a simple, basic example of ClickUp's inefficiency in aggregate calculations for reporting purposes. There is a strong need for improvement in this area. And the truth is, you can't just delegate everything to AI agents — many companies are still unfamiliar with using agents even for their simple reports, or for various reasons prefer not to use them.
Mostafa Shabanpour
To give another example, suppose we categorize how far tasks have passed their deadlines into four levels: Overdue, Critical, Severe, and Alarming. Using nested IF formulas, we assign each task to one of these categories based on how much time has passed since its deadline. Now, when it comes to the dashboard, there is absolutely no way to visualize this data. For instance, if I want to see in a bar chart how many tasks or how much effort falls into each of these categories, it's simply not possible — we just get the message: "Unsupported data type in formula field."
Sigurd Seteklev
Mostafa Shabanpour: Yeah, sorry to hear that you get into these shortcomings.
It seems like you have three asks here:
* Formula fields are slow - improve performance
* You can not do calculations on aggregated fields (how I imagine an advanced calculation card would)
* Support all formula fields everywhere
Is that an ok summarization?
Mostafa Shabanpour
Sigurd Seteklev
There's another issue with formula fields, and that's when you use advanced calculations — fields whose output is obviously a number, yet it's impossible to use them in dashboards or in other columns' calculations. For example, if you want to have the number of days between the request date and the delivery date of a task — which is clearly a numeric output — there's absolutely no way to perform any further calculations on it from another column. I even submitted a ticket for this, but it was never resolved.
Sigurd Seteklev
Mostafa Shabanpour Yes, that is one of the things we plan to fix. Formulas that uses Today() is not possible to report on.
Sorry that you are experiencing this shortcoming.
Becky Sendall
We really want to start using ClickUp for our financial forecasting, we are currently tracking all invoices but I have not found a way to create a true forecast as we cannot overlay overhead spend in one dashboard card. Similarly, we would love to be able to claculate the profit margin we are forecast to achieve each month, which again would require the ability to overlay different number fields from within the Workspace in one card.
This could either be a calculation field that shows the figure, but what would be even better would be if this could also be displayed on a bar chart so we could visually see whether we are going to meet profit margins based on the forecasted figures that are being tracked.
Sigurd Seteklev
Becky Sendall: Thank you for your feedback, Becky!
Sorry that you meet this shortcoming. The only way to do similar things you are mentioning above is to have the numbers on task level, and use a formula field to comput on that level. But if you need to do this across tasks we would need a more advanced formula/calculations in our cards.
I assume here you want to e.g. compare invoices by date with costs related to execution tasks?
Helen Gamage
My most recent user case is always trying to work out how long tickets have been open either open from creation to closed i.e. how many days open and then any closed ones how many days did it take to resolve or the same but from 'in progress' to closed etc. Ultimately we want really nice reporting on resolution times, what is in the min, max and average resolution times, how many days did each ticket take to resolve in reporting - but becuase I cannot use formulas in the dashboards we simply cannot do this. Another variation on this is did it meet the SLA so to be able to set SLAs for certain criteria and then track number of days to different stages and report to see if tasks are meeting SLAs or not.
Helen Gamage
To be honest I would have thought days in status or days from a status to close would be such a common request for people as all sorts of teams have SLAs to meet. I would even rather see these as standard fields not even custom formula fields as the request would be so common.
Sigurd Seteklev
Helen Gamage: Thank you for your feedback!
Yes, this would require new functionality in our dashboards. Would something like "Average time in status" that corresponds to the current "Total time in status" work for your use-case?
Helen Gamage
Sigurd Seteklev - possibly but you may need to judge this over more than 1 status at a time or even over 1 status group. You might just need actually the entire length of the ticket from open to close so far and then fixed when closed to be abel to take averages. It needs to be flexible.
Sigurd Seteklev
Helen Gamage Ok, thank you!
Sela School
One specific use case I’m looking for is the ability to run math formulas on aggregated data. I need to take the total sum of a specific currency field in a List and then multiply or divide it by a set value. This would allow me to calculate things like tax deductions or profit margins from a high level view without having to do the math manually outside of ClickUp.
Sigurd Seteklev
Sela School: Thank you for your feedback! Yeah, we would love to support things like this in the future.
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Dan Reilly
What would be great is if you could look how many hours reported vs estimated hours. The math the system uses is not correct, it double counts subtasks time and main task time. So essentially you cannot use the estimate vs. actual unless you export data from the system. I have had over 15 call about this with account managers and tech leads. I cannot figure out how this software has existed so long without this feature.
Sigurd Seteklev
Dan Reilly: Thank you for your feedback, and sorry that you meet this limitation in ClickUp.
When you say math in the system, is that formula fields or in the cards in dashboards?
Also happy to sync up to discuss this more.
D
Dan Reilly
Sigurd Seteklev This is much easier to explain on a call but this is how the system performs addition of estimated task durations for tasks and subtasks. Our goal is to be able to compare estimated time to time tracked which is not possible to do accurately today. We do think there is a way to work through this with formulas. Happy to share what we are seeing.
Sigurd Seteklev
Dan Reilly Thank you! Perhsaps something for Bugra Oktay and/or Vasil Enchev to look into if it is general to how estimated and time tracked works.
Sigurd Seteklev
Jan Roald Triumfante : You are mentioning additional analytics/cards from other top tier project management software. Can you give us some examples you are really keen to see in ClickUp?
Beata Szlachta
Sigurd Seteklev it would be great to have a possibility to create a report on time spent grouped by task (not per person) in a period of time. So I could compare how the task was estimated, how muc was already spent on it.
Aleksei Sysoev
Sigurd Seteklev we would want to have custom columns for Portfolio card in Dashboards. The bit that are missing for us is ability to count certain types of tasks (e.g., risks and issues) and filter them (to display red or high-score only).
Also, if we can Relationship column with linked specific tasks (e.g., escalations) - that would really help.
Lastly, would be great to have custom columns with people selection - so we can set other owners for each project (e.g., technical lead and senior manager/sponsor).
Sigurd Seteklev
Aleksei Sysoev: The time spent is something for Bugra Oktay and Vasil Enchev .
We are current building a new portfolio card that will let you have custom fields on lists here: https://feedback.clickup.com/feature-requests/p/custom-fields-for-list-folder-or-space
We do plan for roll-ups from task to list level as well, and that should also come in the not too far future.
You will be able to reuse the people type for Lists as well and have them in the portfolio card.
We're still working on this, but hope to have a public beta soon.
Caroline Ginty
Merged in a post:
Line chart with formula field
Marcos Santiago
It would be great to have the possibility to generate a line chart from a formula field, would you have any idea when this function will be available?
Olivier
That would be a huge upgrade !
If possible to consider :
- Using and creating custom fields / variables to be used inside a dashboard with other formulas and variables.
- Some custom fields like "Rating" are not accessible in formula fields but they should be easy to convert into numerals.
- Custom Graphs can only do one thing : i.e calculate sums with the selected fields. would be great to have other means of compiling data within a graph (averages, count, diff, etc.)
Sigurd Seteklev
Olivier: Thank you for you input, Oliver! We are trying to improve our cards and dashboard all the time and feedback like this is valuable.
Olivier
Sigurd Seteklev Much appreciated. Keep up the good work.
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