Why can't I assign a user to a task?

In order to assign a user to a task, you have to make sure that they meet the following:

1. The user is assigned to the project containing the task that you want to assign to them.
2. The user has the appropriate role.
3. The user's role is assigned to an appropriate workflow status.

One of the most common reasons why you can't assign a user to a task or a particular workflow status, or why a user can't claim a task from the Tasks page is that your user has a custom role.

Make sure that your custom role is assigned to an appropriate workflow status. Also, keep in mind that every project has its own workflow setting so the changes you made in one project will not affect others.

Assigning a Custom Role to a Workflow Status

All custom roles won't be assigned to any workflow status upon creation. You need to manually assign them to one.

To assign a role to a workflow status, select the project (#1) you want to work on from the project selection dropdown, then go to Workflow (#2).

From there, select the workflow status you want to assign to your custom role.

How to Allow Users to Claim Tasks?

Assigning a role to the Writing workflow status allows a user with that role to claim tasks from the tasks page provided that they also have the View tasks permission. This will also let you assign them to a task yourself.

Remember that every project in your account has its own workflow settings so you will have to do this again on a new or different project.

And that's it!

If you want more in-depth knowledge about this topic, read on.

Roles, Permissions, and Workflow

A proper combination of permissions and workflow status assignment is important to ensure that your custom role works exactly as intended.

Even if a role is assigned to a correct workflow status, if it doesn't have the correct permissions, it will still limit the capabilities of that role.

Let's take our example earlier. Let's say our custom role is now assigned to the writing workflow status. If the role doesn't have the View Tasks permission, this role won't be able to see the tasks page, which ultimately leads to them not being able to claim any tasks at all. How can you claim tasks when you can't see them?

This scenario isn't entirely useless, however, since you can still manually assign a user with that role to a task yourself (or someone that has the right permissions), and you can only assign a user to a task if their role is assigned to an appropriate workflow status. So if you intend to micromanage users and tasks, this is one of the best solutions.

Learn more about the Workflow page in our separate help article.

We also have a detailed explanation of every permission to help you decide which ones should be activated for your custom role.

We have an overview of User Roles and Permissions too.