Hey, you! Yes, you, reading this PROspectives post! Are you prepping for year-end administration season yet?
No?! Well, heck, it’s just a few weeks away. You’d better get going!
Ooh, I see! You’re telling me you’ve followed all our recommendations so far, and as such, you’ve already set up an annual Project Template to track your workflow, which you can keep using year after year with little fuss — no prep work needed. The way you talk about it, it sounds well-crafted. I’m impressed. Nice work!
But hey, to make sure all your bases are covered, I have a couple of items relating to Project Templates I’d like to mention as the year winds to a close. Hopefully, they’ll save you from some additional panic during crunch time.
First thing: in 2025, we made a change requiring all Worktrays to now have at least one active Employee assigned to them. The idea is that a Project Task shouldn’t end up in a Worktray that doesn’t have anybody who can see it, thus being lost to the void until it becomes a huge problem. However, in the past, we’ve recommended Data Collection Tasks be assigned to an empty Worktray to keep tabs on them. If you followed this advice, and the Worktray doesn’t have any Employees, you might hit an error when trying to launch the Projects this year. You’ll need to edit the Project Template and set the Worktrays for these Tasks to Unassigned to avoid this issue. If you need a refresher on setting up Worktrays, see our Worktray Management article on the Help Center.
This is also a good time to be considering Project Fields! When you were doing year-end administration last year, did you think to yourself, “Boy, I’d sure like to report on this questionnaire response” or “Gee, I’d really love to use that testing result in a Merge Document”? Well, you can! All you need to do is edit the Template and slap a Project Field on that Task Item, and then you can use that response anywhere. But you need to do that now, before you launch the Projects — once the Project is launched, it’s too late to add the Project Field. Need more details? Check out our Help article on Project Fields.
Some other items you might consider reviewing while you’re editing your Template:
- Process / Task flow
- Questionnaire items
- Employee Role & Worktray assignments
- Events
Hmm? OH, right! I never mentioned how to edit your Project Template. You’ve got some options — pick whichever you like.
From the Project Templates grid (Maintenance > Templates), follow one of these methods:
- Edit in PensionPro: Double-click on the Project Template to open it. Project-level details (like Name, Project Manager and External Deadline) are edited on the Summary Tasks and Task Items, meanwhile, are edited in the Workflow view.
- Edit in Excel: Click once to select the Project Template in the grid, then use the Export option in the More menu at the top-right to save the Excel file to your device. Edit the Template, then re-import via the More menu by selecting the Project Template Import option.
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- If you do it this way, make sure you delete the old Template before you re-import — PensionPro won’t accept two Templates with the same name.
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If you plan on keeping both the old and new versions of the Project Template, you can duplicate the original by hovering over it in the grid and choosing the Copy option on the right. Then, make the edits to the duplicate!
One thing to note for companies who have already converted over to Projects 2.0: if you’re planning on editing your Project Template in Excel, be aware that we added a new setting for Tasks called Data Collection Step, located in Column C. If you have any old Excel Templates floating around on your hard drive, PensionPro won’t accept them for import anymore. But you can easily get the new format by exporting any Project Template that’s in PensionPro already.
That’s all I have to say about Project Templates today, but I do have one last thing to mention before I set you loose with planning for year-end. We recently hosted a webinar highlighting a selection of other year-end considerations. Attendees also received a handout that acts as a “checklist” to help ensure readiness. Missed out? We made sure both the webinar and the corresponding handout are available to you on our Recent Webinars page.
All right, I’ve taken up enough of your time — I’m sure you’ve got work to do! But if you get stuck along the way (either now or later), head over to our Help Center where you can find all our resources or submit a ticket to our stellar Support team. Best of luck with your upcoming data collections!
Josh Wilson
Training & Development Specialist