Why We Got Rid of Tasks

Tasks are gone. The Tasks page, the Tasks widget on the dashboard, "Assign as task" on attention items, task attachments, and the task endpoints in the REST API, the MCP server and the CLI. The code is removed rather than switched off behind a flag.

We shipped Tasks in February as a full task management system inside your workspace: a weekly planner with drag and drop, subtasks, a timer on any task, file attachments, and tasks created for you when an invoice went overdue or a bank connection was about to expire. We redesigned the page in March. It was real work, and most of it worked well.

The queue made it redundant

Since July, Expensicat records every finding and decision as an item in the "Needs attention" queue on your dashboard. An overdue invoice, an expiring bank connection, an unusual charge, a missing receipt, a question about how something got paid. Each item carries the reasoning that produced it, resolves inline, and undoes in one tap, and every record keeps its own Agent activity history. The automatic tasks moved into that queue, which is where they belonged. From then on, two features were doing one job.

The same work, twice

You could turn an attention item into a task with "Assign as task", and the same piece of work then existed in two places. The task copy had to be kept in sync with the finding it came from. You could not complete the task while the underlying finding was still open, and if the finding was undone, the task came back. That behavior was correct and it was still confusing, because a to-do that refuses to be ticked off does not read as a to-do.

The categories bled into each other too. Tasks Expensicat created for you looked like things you had written down yourself, and things you had written down yourself sat next to system findings. When you wanted to know what needed you today, the honest answer was to check the dashboard queue, then check the tasks page, and hold both lists in your head.

Almost nobody used it

Tasks were barely touched. In my own Expensicat workspace, the one I run this company from, there has never been a single task. I built a weekly planner with drag and drop and a timer on it, and then never opened it to plan a week.

That is worth more than any argument about scope. We would rather delete a feature than keep a half-used one alive out of sentiment for the work that went into it. Clean up, don't deprecate.

A planner is data entry

Expensicat is the finance team for people who do not have one. The job is review and approval. Work arrives, it gets handled or it gets escalated, and you rule on the exceptions with the reasoning in front of you.

A to-do list is the opposite shape. Nothing arrives on its own. You type it in, you schedule it, you drag it to Thursday when Wednesday fills up. That is data entry, the exact thing we take off your plate everywhere else in the product. Linear and Asana are very good at it for teams whose work is planning work, which is a different job with a different buyer. A second-best planner living inside a finance tool helps nobody, and it made the product harder to explain in one sentence.

Where your open work lives now

The "Needs attention" queue on your dashboard holds everything waiting on a person, with the reasoning attached and undo on anything you resolve. Each transaction, inbox item and invoice shows its own Agent activity, so you can see what happened to that record without leaving it. If you would rather ask than scroll, ask Cat to walk you through everything open.

Time tracking is unchanged. A timer you started from a task was always an ordinary time entry, and it stays where it was on the time tracking page. Files you attached to a task are still in Documents. Documents and receipts still attach to transactions, invoices, customers and projects.

So there is one list now, at the top of your dashboard, and it fills itself.