Now that you've gotten acquainted with the UI, we can begin building templates. Templates in TaskRay are king because they allow you to create more consistency in how projects are managed and can be easily cloned. By creating effective templates, you can allow your users to focus on the important stuff, working with your clients.
We recommend creating templates using the Template Builder. The Template Builder is a tool that will walk you through all of the best practices regarding the structure and elements of an effective template in TaskRay. When you go into the Template Builder, you will input the project and its details first, then you will create the task groups, or phases/stages of your project. After that you will create the individual tasks/checklist items that belong to each task group. Check out this article for the step-by-step instructions on using the Template Builder.
What’s next….
If your org would like to track time against your tasks/projects, you will want to add values to the 'Estimated Time (hrs)' on each task. This will roll up to the project to give a total number of estimated hours it should take to complete the project and is a great addition to the metrics you will be using to measure the success of your projects.
NOTE: Time tracking is available in Standard Edition and above
Now that you have the basic structure down, we need to create the team. We always recommend using queues as the task owners in a template. Queues are used as a placeholder for the role that will own that project/task. This will allow you to easily bulk assign tasks when a live project is created from that template. 'TaskRay Unassigned' queue is available by default, but know that you can create custom ones to fit your needs.
After you've created and assigned the team, we need to focus on the project schedule. We recommend a couple of important aspects of tasks in a template. First, each task should have a start date and an estimated end date.
This way, a duration value is created. The dates in the template are used to generate duration values and those duration values are how we build out the full project when cloned. When we clone that template, we are going to look at the duration value of each task in order to build out the project schedule on the newly created live project. For example, if the first task is 1 business day, the second is 3 days, and the third is 2 days, we know we need to create this project with a total of 6 business days. Additionally, we recommend creating dependencies between all tasks in a template. 
Dependencies are used to keep project schedules up-to-date as tasks shift, however, they can be used to enforce the order in which tasks are completed with additional configuration.. In the simple example above, if task 2 gets delayed a week, with a dependency between task 2 and 3, task 3 will automatically reschedule to follow the new dates for task 2. If you would like to enforce the behavior where tasks must be done in order based on dependency, follow this support article.
Congratulations, you've built your first template. Repeat these steps for any additional templates and you are on your way to using TaskRay like a pro.
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