ClickUp Rollups Tutorial (How & Why to Use This Feature)

If you're a ClickUp user who's confused by the concept of rollup fields, you're not alone. It's a confusing concept in general, and in ClickUp it's a little extra confusing than what it means outside of ClickUp. So in this video, I'm going to take you step by step through what a rollup is, how can you create them? And yes, there are two ways to do that. And why exactly would anyone want to use a rollup? What's the actual real world use use? That is kind of the baseline of what we're going through today. However, in order to enjoy this video and understand what the heck we're talking about, we need to start our rollups conversation by understanding relationships. The reason we're going to start off by talking about relationships is because we need to have relationships in order for a rollup to exist. I hope that'll make sense soon, but if not, just drop me a comment to start us off. Here is a basic visualization of a relationship. And if you've seen our video all about relationships, which we cover up here, this will probably look pretty familiar with you. This is visualizing how the task called Layla Pomper is related to the separate task all the way over in a different world called CEO. CEO is related to Layla, Layla is related to CEO. It's a relationship between these two tasks in ClickUp. If we're on the same page there, we'll continue on. But if this is confusing, if you're like, wait, what's a relationship? I want to invite you to go back to that video I mentioned and watch that first and then come back here. Because really, understanding relationships is required for this whole roll up thing to make any sense whatsoever. Once we've established a relationship between two tasks, we can now start to use rollups. Rollups basically say, hey, based on this relationship, tell me something else about either end of the relationship. So here we've made this relationship between Layla and CEO and now because that relationship exists, we can say, hey, based on this relationship, tell me the status of what that thing is I'm related to to show what this looks like actually in ClickUp. Here it is, I have Layla Pomper. She's related to CEO. And hey, because this relationship exists, I can now show details about the CEO task in a roll up, in a summary, in a hey, show me this through that right here in the relationship. This column is a roll up because it's showing me stuff that's in the CEO task. Even though I'm not in the CEO task. Hope that makes sense. We'll go through a few more examples. Let me show you what that looks like if we were to build it out together. So you can see what I mean by this relationship magic. If I have two lists in ClickUp, one for company name and one for company contact, I can relate these together with a relationship. You've already gotten that down by now, but let's build it together. I'm going to click Plus, I'm going to go down to relationship and I'm going to call this contact company relationship. Perfect. Now I'm going to go ahead and relate this company name list to the company contact list. There we go. We'll ignore this field for now, but we'll talk about this in a moment. Once I add this field, I can now connect Acme Inc. To the contact I have for Acme Inc. And the same thing for ProcessDriven. Again, this is nothing exciting. This is just a relationship between two tasks. But now that there's a relationship, we've made it possible for us to have rollups. So if I go inside the process driven task and scroll way down, I see this contact and company relationship I built. What if I want to see more about Layla than just her name? Maybe I want to know the phone number of this contact. I can go over here to plus add a rollup, and I can browse through any of the fields on the contact list and preview them here as a rollup. So I'm going to click phone number, add this in, and all of a sudden I can see data from the contact list, which is not actually available here on the company name list, but view it inside this relationship. This is one example of a rollup. This can be set up exactly like I showed you here of clicking add a rollup, selecting whatever field it is you want to see, and then adding it in. It can also be added out here in the same exact way. But you go up to the top, click Edit field and you can actually add these fields here. They do the same thing. They're just available in two different places. That is what this Create rollup field is referring to. But by itself, this kind of relationship is really just letting us preview information based on the relationship. Rollups can also go one step further though. Let's just imagine we had three different points of contact for the ProcessDriven company. This relationship has three different tasks related to it. If we were to click inside here and view the data, it's a lot of data to see at one time, and it's really hard to summarize it all together because as of right now, it's just showing us all of it. Imagine if we had 50 tasks here. That would be 50 different phone numbers and not a really good big picture overview. That's where the second superpower of rollups can be handy. Rather than just having your rollups appear in the place that you're trying to see, you can also have rollups do some basic math for you. For example, I could create a new column called a rollup field which works the exact same way as the built in rollups. But with this extra bonus feature, I can select my existing relationship from this menu. We can now select any field from the contacts area and have it show up here. That's just a roll up. That's just what we did before. Why is this exciting? Because depending on what we choose, we now have a new calculate option appear. So let me just go ahead and give this a name. Contact closed. We'll call it that. Just for clarity, we can now say, hey, of all of the closing dates of all of the related tasks, I want you to just show me the earliest or the latest or the whole range, minimum and maximum or no calculation. Just show me all the numbers. While this is still called a rollup. This rollup being its own column opens up this possibility of calculations and summaries. That is really, really cool. Let me just go ahead and close some of these so we can see what's going on here. We've got two of them closed. Now if I go back over here into this relationship and refresh. Now if I come back to the company name list, we see that those close dates of today's date show up here. This lets us know what when the close dates happened. If I go up and edit this column, I could change this to be the earliest date, latest date, or the range of dates. This would be really nice if we had a variety of dates happening. But here you can see I closed these a few seconds ago, so it's not that interesting of a result. If I wanted to create another roll up column just to show you one more possibility, we could call this contact status. We can select the same relationship because that's what we're looking up based on and rolling up based on. And we can say, hey, show me the status of everything related to this. There is no option to calculate here because calculation is always assumed with the status rollup. I'm going to click create and here we can see something pretty cool show up. We see a contact statuses roll up field. And rather than just showing us the statuses like it would if we created a status field right here, look at this comparison here. This is what it would show us in a normal rollup. This rollup column allows us to see in a kind of a bar battery chart thing what the statuses are of what we have connected. We've got two complete and one to do this visually to me at least, is easier to see than having to click inside here, scroll over to the right and see the statuses. So there you go. This is our rollup field and this is how you can make that rollup field its own column if you so choose. Now, just a pro tip around rollups and all the stuff I'm showing you here. You'll notice that when I go to edit these rollups, I'm seeing a lot of options here, including a lot of loud car noises outside and the custom fields available. Here it is showing me the custom fields on the contacts list, things like the phone number, the difficulty, those are all showing up. That's because the relationship I have is a custom relationship built between one list and another list. I'll show you what that looks like right here. Edit relationship. This relationship is between one list and another list. If I didn't have this kind of relationship, if I had a relationship where I was relating a task to any task in my workspace, or if I was using dependency or a task link or anything like this, I would not have the same options of rollups. If you'll click on this area, you'll notice no custom fields are available here. So that's why I want to share this as a pro tip. If you want to be able to pull in things like custom fields from one list to another in a roll up, your relationship type has to be tasks from a specific list, at least at this point in time. If you choose the any tasks in your workspace option, you will not have the option to pull in custom fields. And as a rollup, unfortunately it's just not going to work at this point in time. So just a little pro tip for you. Now, the next question you might have is. All right, cool. Roll ups. Nice. Awesome. How exactly would I use these? What are some common applications? Well, the example I'm showing you right here of relating a contact to a company, this is actually a pretty common scenario. Relationships are used quite heavily in CRM style setups in ClickUp. To be clear, ClickUp is still not an amazing CRM. It lacks a lot of features that competitors have. But this relationships feature does really help in these use cases. In fact, I have a tutorial on that right here if you want to learn about the CRM application. The other example for when you might use this is what I actually use inside our Process Driven Membership course where we teach people how to systemize their business using ClickUp. We actually teach folks to create an SOPS list and we also have them create a humans list. Now you could call this whatever you want, but the idea is to have a list for all of your people like John Doe and to create a list for all of your SOPs or recipes or instructions, how to make toast, how to answer the phone, how to respond to email. And we like to use relationships to connect people as tasks here with SOPs as tasks. This is one way that we use relationships inside the process driven membership. And I would encourage you to consider as well. The third example I want to give in terms of using relationships in the real world is actually the one I'm going to link up here which is using ClickUp to document automations. And similar to this SOPS and human setup you see here, what we're going to do is create a list of automations in our business, a list of software in our business, and relate them together using rollups and relationships. All of these things where we're using relationships, we want to also use rollups because it'll allow us to summarize that relationship. To give one more example, in case you haven't had enough yet, I also want to point to this one up here where we actually use relationships and rollups to keep track of our content creation and content repurposing and where we really heavily use roll up fields to be able to view due dates of one thing over here in another place using dependency relationships. So CRM, SOPs, automation, database and content. I mean between that we've pretty much hit every department of the business. Those are some common ways that you might incorporate rollups into your daily flow. Just a reminder that you cannot have rollups of a rollup you yet in ClickUp. We've been looking for it, we've been asking for it. There have been moments where it seems to have worked, but not consistently. So if you have multiple relationships chained together, there is not a way to send that rollup all the way through the whole chain unfortunately. Maybe someday, but otherwise I think that concludes this brief tutorial on ClickUp rollups. If you have questions, which I'm sure you might, I mean this was just a brief overview, please, please do drop them in the comments below. And if you'd like to see more about how we use rollups inside our own kind of, I would say, pretty sophisticated structure for how we recommend people systemize their business, I do want to invite you to check out the link in the description where you can learn more about our membership inside that membership. This kind of roll up structure is a key cornerstone to how we recommend people set up their ClickUp foundation and ClickUp hierarchy. So curious minds go check that out. Otherwise, thanks so much for watching like and subscribe if you can. And until next time, enjoy the process.