How can you set up recurring tasks?

[Bethany Carter]

I was in the process of moving from Trello to Clickup but I've just discovered Jira. The only thing I can't figure out is how I can set up automated recurring tasks. Please can you help? I don't want to invest lots of time getting everything set up only to find this isn't possible, as it's essential for us. 

A lot of the work we do repeats every month. I need to be able to automate it so that, upon completion of a task, it is automatically duplicated and lined up for the same dates and allocated to the same team member in the following month. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Bethany Carter 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

The tags on you post indicate you are using a Free subscription. Is that accurate?

Natively Jira doesn't have a feature that is exclusively for creating/managing recurring tasks. But it has Automation Rules which would support the automated creation of a new task when an existing task is transitioned to a specified status. If you are using the Free subscription, though, there is a limit of only 100 Automation Rule executions per month.

There are third party apps available in the Atlassian Marketplace that can help you manage recurring tasks. The apps may not be free, and you would need to review the capabilities to see if any one of them would meet your requirements.

[Bethany Carter]

Thanks @Trudy Claspill I have only started using it today so I am on a free trial. I tried exploring the automation options but nothing was coming up when I searched terms like recur or repeat so I got a bit stuck! Sadly I don't have the time or expertise to go searching through the marketplace in the hope of finding something suitable 😅 If it's not simple, it's not going to work for me. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hi Bethany,

The type of automation rule you would need would be something like this:

WHEN: issue transitioned
  To status: Done (or whatever values you use for "done")

THEN: Clone Issue

Within the "Clone Issue" action you have the ability to set/change values in the issue being created. Without knowing the details of "lined up for the same dates ... for the next month" I can't tell you specifically how that would be set.

Jira supports two project customization architectures (as I call them) - Company Managed and Team Managed. With the Company Managed customization architecture the customizations can be shared between projects and are managed by Jira Administrators. With the Team Managed customization architecture the customizations are local to the individual projects. A given project can use only one of those architectures, but you can have some projects using Company Managed while others use Team Managed.

If your environment is limited (by your Jira Administrators) to using only the Company Managed customization architecture, then you could use one rule like the one above to take the same action against all the projects.

I suspect this doesn't sound "simple", but it really doesn't have to be complicated either. If your use of Jira will be structured and managed, this is simple. If you need your use of Jira to be more free form and customizable per team, then it will be more complicated to meet your requirement.

[Stephen_Lugton]

Following on from what  @Trudy Claspill said, we have a monthly scheduled task that gets assigned to the same person each month, the automation I created for that uses a schedule and task creation so that it's totally independent of the previous month's task.

The project key is CPT as you can see from the images, this is important as I have set the task to be created with the parent 'CPT-1810' (an epic); doing this allows me to assign the epic to the person who will be doing the recurring task.  This does mean that I don't assign the task in the task creation but instead use a branch to update the most recently created issue by copying the assignee from the parent issue.  The reason for doing it this way is so that if the person doing the task changes all I have to do is reassign the epic rather than update the automation.

You can also see that I've used a smartvalue to set up the due date for the task to be 7 days after the task is created on the first of the month, i.e. the 8th of the month, the smart value for this is:

{{now.plusdays(7)}}

This simply takes whatever date the task is created on i.e. 'now' and uses adds 7 days to it using 'plusdays'.  Just make sure when using smartvalues like this to have double curly brackets at the start and end.

Use the link @Trudy Claspill shared for more info on automation rules

[Bethany Carter]

Thank you both so much for taking the time to explain this to me and share your suggestions. This is so so helpful! I will spend a bit more time playing with the options 👍

[Marlene Kegel - codefortynine]

Welcome to the community, @Bethany Carter.

I am Marlene, product manager of Deep Clone for Jira.

You could also try out our app, which is maybe easier for you. Deep Clone is free for up to 10 users.

For your use case I would recommend the Deep Clone workflow post-function. With this feature you can automatically clone an issue (or epic) on a workflow transition - e.g. when you set a task from "In Progress" to "Done".

You can read more about setting up a Deep Clone Post-Function in our documentation.