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Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Project Management

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At a glance

The percentage of Vortex IQ findings created in Basecamp in the last 90 days that have been ticked complete. It is the team’s batting average against the audit programme. Below 50% the team is falling behind; above 75% the team is matching or beating intake. On Basecamp specifically, this card is the most useful single number for an owner to glance at, because Basecamp does not surface velocity, throughput, or any other rollup natively.

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Basecamp data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A 16-person UK outdoor-equipment brand on Adobe Commerce. They run Basecamp as the company-wide PM tool because the founders prefer it for client-comms transparency (they share Basecamp project access with two key suppliers). Snapshot taken on 02 May 26 at 14:30 BST.
What the merchant should read into this:
  1. 64% sits in the amber band (50-74%). Above the alarm threshold but below the green target. The team is closing more than it is opening, but slowly enough that the open queue shrinks by only one or two items per week net. Acceptable, not great.
  2. The open queue will not collapse to zero. At 64% resolution rate, expect roughly 18-22 open findings as a steady-state on a 16-person Basecamp team. Anything beyond that is the team falling behind; anything below it is the audit programme finding less than usual.
  3. Pair this card with Avg Time-to-Fix. A 64% rate with a 7-day mean time-to-fix is healthy. A 64% rate with a 25-day mean time-to-fix means the team is closing the easy items and stalling on the harder ones. Basecamp teams trend toward longer time-to-fix because the tool’s no-priority model means harder items naturally drift to the bottom of the list.
  4. Compare against Findings Open trend. If open count is rising for three weeks while resolution rate sits at 64%, the audit programme is producing more findings than the team can absorb, a calibration issue with the audit, not a team problem.
  5. The team should aim for 75% sustained. Below 50% is alarm territory; above 75% means the team is keeping up with intake. Basecamp teams commonly run lower (60-75%) than Linear or ClickUp teams because Basecamp’s intentional simplicity discourages aggressive throughput targeting. 64% is a respectable Basecamp number; pushing it higher means tightening the weekly triage rhythm, not adopting heavier tooling.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Basecamp’s own UI:
Basecamp does not natively expose a resolution-rate number, no Reports module, no Dashboards module, no rollups. The closest manual equivalent is to open the Vortex IQ Findings to-do list and read the small X completed link below the open items; clicking it expands the completed section. To compute the rate by hand you would compare that count against the open count over a 90-day window, which is genuinely awkward to do in Basecamp’s UI. Basecamp’s Activity feed (project home → Activity) shows the trail of completions over time, useful for spot-checking whether the rate moved due to a normal weekly tick-rate or a single bulk-close event.
The honest read is: Basecamp does not surface this metric, on purpose. The 37signals product philosophy holds that ratios and rates encourage measurement-driven management at the expense of team focus. We respect the philosophy by surfacing the rate here in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre rather than asking Basecamp to produce one. Why our number may legitimately differ from a hand-computed Basecamp count: Cross-connector reconciliation. Basecamp resolution rate vs operations-health peers:

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

My hand count says 71% but Vortex IQ says 64%. What’s wrong? Seven points of gap is normal. The usual reasons in order: (1) Re-created findings: a hand count would tally each completion event; we count once per finding-id. If your team has a habit of re-creating to-dos, our number is the more conservative one. (2) Multi-account aggregation: we sum numerator and denominator across connected Basecamp accounts. (3) Window-rolling timezone (UTC vs your profile timezone). Open the per-account stack panel and the gap usually closes to within 2-3 points. Does a tick-complete with a “won’t do” comment count as resolved? Yes. From the audit programme’s perspective, both decisions are resolutions: the team chose to close the loop. Basecamp does not have a separate Won’t Do state, so the convention is to leave a comment on the to-do explaining the close decision. We treat all completions as identical because over-counting “won’t do” closures (e.g. only counting tick-completes without explanation comments) discourages teams from cleanly closing low-value findings, which is the worst outcome. Our rate sits at 45%. Should I be concerned? Yes. Below 50% is the alarm threshold for a reason: the open queue compounds week-over-week and abandonment rate climbs in the following weeks. The standard playbook is the four-card investigation: open this card, Findings Open, Abandoned Findings, and Tickets by Assignee side-by-side. Within 5 minutes you’ll know if it’s a single-assignee bottleneck (most common on small Basecamp teams), a triage-rhythm bottleneck (the team stopped doing the weekly review), or a calibration issue with the audit programme. We use multiple Basecamp accounts. Which account’s rate matters most? The one with the lowest rate is the leading indicator. Open the per-account stack panel from the connector drawer to see them broken out. Agencies running 5-10 client accounts often find the lowest-rate account is the one where the relationship is going stale; the rate dip preceding the client-relationship dip by several weeks is a real pattern. Throughput dropped this week, rate is still high. What’s happening? This is the “team closed everything easy and left the hard stuff” pattern, common on Basecamp because the no-priority model lets harder items drift to the bottom of the list. Open Avg Time-to-Fix, if mean cycle time climbed alongside the throughput drop, the team has finished the quick-wins and is now starting on the heavier findings. This is a healthy phase that lasts 1-3 weeks; rate will dip during it then recover. Today’s rate looks volatile. Why? At low resolution volumes the rate is sensitive: 5 resolutions out of 8 is 62.5% and one extra close moves it to 75%. The 90-day window makes daily volatility small but visible. The 7-day moving rate (shown on the trend line beneath the headline) is less noisy. Multi-team reporting: how do I see resolution rate by team within one Basecamp account? Basecamp’s project-room model means each team typically lives in its own bucket. Pin a per-bucket stack panel to see them broken out. There is no team-level grouping inside a bucket, that is by design (Basecamp considers within-project subdivisions an anti-pattern), so per-team rate within a single bucket is not available natively. Is Basecamp the right tool for tracking this metric? For small ecommerce teams (under 20 people) that prize calm process over feature richness, yes. Basecamp’s intentional simplicity removes the noise that makes resolution-rate hard to interpret on tools like ClickUp or Monday. The cost is that Basecamp gives you no other rollup or report; this card is doing all the work the tool itself does not. Engineering-only teams will find Linear’s velocity-and-cycle-time machinery more native. Agencies juggling multiple client workstreams in one tool will find Teamwork’s time-tracking integration more useful. ClickUp’s strength here is the per-task time-tracking we currently do not consume; Smartsheet’s strength is the spreadsheet-style PMO rollup. Basecamp’s strength is restraint, which makes the resolution-rate number unusually clean once you have it. Resolution rate climbed but I don’t think the team did anything different. What changed? Three usual causes. (1) Audit programme produced fewer findings this period (denominator shrank, rate climbed). Check the Findings Open trend. (2) A bulk closure of stale to-dos (e.g. the team did an “abandoned review” and ticked complete on 15 items). Check Basecamp’s Activity feed for a cluster of completion entries. (3) Project archiving: if a project was archived this week, all its open findings dropped out of the denominator while the resolved count stayed; this can lift rate by 5-10 points overnight. Why doesn’t Basecamp ship a resolution-rate widget? 37signals deliberately does not ship rates, ratios, or rollups, the philosophy is that managing-by-metric pulls focus away from team conversation. We respect this by surfacing the rate here, leaving Basecamp itself uncluttered. The same restraint applies to Trello (no rate widget), Asana (rate exists only inside the paid Reporting module), and Linear (cycle-time machinery is rich but rate per finding-set is not native). Smartsheet, ClickUp, and Monday all expose dashboard widgets that approximate this rate; Basecamp is the only one of the six that explicitly will not.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Finding Resolution Rate (90d) is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Basecamp and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.