How to assign multiple resources and estimated time per resource to a card

[Daniel Walsh]

Can any Trello experts help me here? I've searched high and low for a solution but am struggling.

I'm trying to create a project management board, where each list represents major categories of work, and each card represents specific items of work within the category. 

I want to be able to assign estimated time (days) for multiple resources (staff) to each card, and then set a daily cost per resource, and be able to calculate the total cost for each list and the overall board.

I can see this would be easy enough if there was only 1 resource per card, using members and custom fields. The challenges I need help with are:

1. I need to be able to allocate multiple resources per card each with a different amount of time allocated.

2. Each resources' daily rate (cost) is a fixed value so I'd ideally like to have that in a separate place as like a lookup that every card which has that resource assigned can reference to calculate their total cost.

3. Ideally I would to use a custom field for the resources as we don't yet have real people in these people so no active trello accounts to assign as 'members'. 

Is any of this possible?! Thanks.

[Hannah Morgan · Accepted solution]

Hi @Daniel Walsh ! Welcome to the community :) you can create calculated custom fields using butler (see here under Custom field arithmetic).

Maybe you could add custom number fields for each member. For each card, you can input a number in each field which will represent the estimated hours needed for each member.

Then, have another custom field "total hours" that sums up those values for each member. 

On top of that, you can create another field to calculate the total cost by multiplying their hourly rate by the total hours.

You could contain those totals in a separate card on your board. It might be better to have a separate board in fact - that way, you're not cluttering your board with lots of fields.

This is how it would look:

Alternatively, Dashcards allow you to sum up values from custom fields. It won't calculate the total cost, but you could just do a quick calculation based on the sums shown in the cards and their hourly rate. So something like this:



If you need help implementing the above, feel free to hit me up hannah@simplaworkflows.com

[milynnus]

@Hannah Morgan 

Nice!👏

@Daniel Walsh do share your insight on its use should you implement this for your projects.

[Daniel Walsh]

Sounds like exactly what I need thanks!

[milynnus]

@Daniel Walsh 

I am not an expert in Clockify. Saw a client using it and found that you can set estimates. 

https://clockify.me/blog/productivity/track-time-in-trello/#Managing_estimates

[Daniel Walsh]

Thanks for the suggestion, but it doesn't appear to do quite what we need it to do (the interface is also very clunky and unintuitive).