By default in monday.com, the timeline of a parent item does not automatically follow or update to match timelines of sub-items as they are not inherently synced. Apparently this is an intentional design so that users that do not want their parent item’s timeline to always mirror or depend on sub-items, but what about the users that WANT it to be synced? Should there not be an option to have it synced? We’re currently wasting time having to manually update parent item timelines to match the total timeline of the sub-item tasks where we wouldn’t have to do this in other project management software.
What are you trying to achieve
Create an option to sync parent item timelines with sub-item timelines to allow for more efficient project management.
Welcome to the community! There is an option (in the subitem timeline column) to “Show in parent” this will create a total timeline in the parent item. The newly added column in the parent is not a real timeline column though, it is a kind of a mirror that makes it difficult to run automations on and makes it impossible to enter data directly in the timeline of the parent (in case a parent does not have subtitems). The app Rollup Subitems in the marketplace overcome those challenges.
Thank you for sharing the option for “Show in parent”, this helps not have to update the timeline every single time a sub-item timeline changes. To your point, this column is just a mirror and unfortunately it won’t show up in the Gantt chart view. Do you know if the Rollup Subitems app allows for the timeline column to summarize the sub-item timelines that would be visible on the Gantt chart?
The app consolidates a subitem timeline (and many other columns) to normal parent item columns (in this case a normal timeline). Therefore the Gantt will show the consolidated timeline from the subitems. The app also allows for filtering to be able to use just a subset of the subitems column values for consolidation.
hi! @jbenoit it’s one of those monday design “choices” that makes sense for flexibility but not for real-world project tracking.
If you want better visibility into how subitem timelines actually affect the parent task, check out Time in Status for monday.com. It doesn’t sync the dates automatically, but it gives you detailed time reports and helps you see where the real delays or overlaps are happening between subitems and parent timelines. Super useful for project tracking without manual date updates.
