What is the purpose of action steps? How are they different than tasks or tickets?

Action steps are used for time tracking.

Let's dive into project management with our three-level structure. A project contains tasks and tasks are made up of action steps. Each level is represented by an app, which you can find in your shortcut bar or in your app menu.

Projects assists you in keeping track of projects from the early ideas until the very end. Together with tasks and action steps, it becomes a powerful toolset to manage each project carefully and to get your projects done.

Tasks let you organize and manage the tasks in your team more efficiently and assign them to other users with only a few clicks.

Action Steps helps you to keep track of the effort that went into tasks and tickets. It allows for swift assessment of work hours and assists you in smartly managing your team's time resources.

Here's an example: Let's say you want to design a new website. That's quite a big mission, so you create the project 'website'. Within that project you collect all the tasks you can think of like 'layout' or 'domain'. Clearly those two also exist of many different steps. And here we use our action steps. Maybe the task 'domain' requires to search for a host, create the database structure behind the website or install redirections from existing websites. These would be your action steps. The effort that went into your work will be tracked in your action steps. Every action step and task has an assigned user, so responsibilites are clearly defined.

And this is how it works: To create a new project simply open the Projects app and select New Project.

First you give your project a name. Project numbers are generated automatically but can be changed. You can select a status and write a description and even use tags. With saving the basic information of your project, you have created a framework which can be filled with content now.

A project consists of several tasks. You can either create a new task via the Tasks app and then associate it with an existing project or you create a new task within a project. Let's create a task within our new project. Select Add new Task and fill in the basic information of your new task. You can set the responsible person right now or later.

Now you have created a task which is associated with your project.

Finally we create some action steps. Choose a task that you'd like to describe in greater detail.

Now you can see all you action steps belonging to your task.

Maybe you want to use tasks or action steps without an associated object. Just create them in the respective app. If you want, you can assigne them later.

Action steps are made for time recording. When you finished an action step, you can set the status to Complete. Be aware, that after completing, you can't change the effort or delete the action step any more.

But you can cancel completed action steps via Options. When you look on the right side you can see to which task and project your action step is assigned.

You can see the status of all assigned action steps in one view.

The only way to record working time is by action steps. Neither tasks nor projects can do this. The effort shown in a project is the sum of all associated tasks and the effort shown in a task is the sum of all associated action step efforts.