Tickets we created from audit findings that haven’t been resolved yet.
At a glance
The number of Basecamp to-dos Vortex IQ created from audit findings that have not been ticked complete. Basecamp is the opinionated, anti-feature-bloat PM tool from 37signals, no statuses, no priorities, no custom fields, just to-dos that are either open or done. That simplicity is why this card matters: the number is unambiguous, but it carries no priority signal of its own. A high count on a Basecamp team means the work is queued; whether it is the right work in the right order is a decision the team owns, not a status the tool encodes.
| What it counts | Open to-do items inside Basecamp to-do lists that Vortex IQ writes findings into. A to-do counts as open until a teammate ticks the checkbox or it is moved to a list explicitly tagged as a closed list. |
| API endpoint | GET /buckets/{project_id}/todolists/{list_id}/todos.json and GET /buckets/{project_id}/todolists/{list_id}/todos/completed.json from https://3.basecampapi.com/{account_id}, paged via the Link header (Basecamp BC3 REST). The connector polls every 5 minutes; Basecamp does not currently emit per-to-do webhooks, so polling is the only refresh path. |
| Project / board scope | One Basecamp project (called a Bucket in the API) per connected workspace, mapped at setup. Vortex IQ writes into a single named to-do list inside that project, defaulting to Vortex IQ Findings. Multi-project merchants connect each project as its own Basecamp connection. |
| Status filter | Basecamp’s data model has no status field. A to-do is either completed: false (open) or completed: true (done). We count only completed: false. |
| Issue type filter | Not applicable. Basecamp does not have issue types; every finding is a to-do. |
| Resolution counts | A to-do drops out of this count the moment its checkbox is ticked. Basecamp’s UI sometimes shows a brief “completed” animation for ticked items; the count drops on the next 5-minute poll, so expect up to 5 minutes of lag. |
| Archived projects | Excluded server-side. The Basecamp API returns no items for archived buckets. |
| Time window | RT, refreshed within 5 minutes of the polling cycle. |
| Alert trigger | > 20 open raises a warn-level alert. Basecamp teams typically run with smaller open counts than ClickUp or Monday teams because the tool nudges toward closing things, so the 20 threshold catches drift early. |
| Time zone | Basecamp stores created_at and completed_at as ISO-8601 UTC. Vortex IQ aligns the RT window to UTC. |
| Multi-account aggregation | One Basecamp account = one connected workspace. Agency merchants who run several client accounts connect each separately; this card sums across all connected accounts unless you pin a per-account stack panel. |
| Roles | owner, operations |
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.Worked example
A small UK-based artisan candle brand on Shopify, 9-person team across founders, 2 marketing, 1 ops, 1 designer, and 4 part-time fulfilment. They run Basecamp as their only project tool because the founders ran an agency on Basecamp Classic and prefer it over Asana or Linear. Snapshot taken on 02 May 26 at 11:00 BST.| Basecamp project (bucket) | Open to-dos in Vortex IQ Findings list | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing & Comms | 8 | Five product-page meta description regressions from the Spring collection drop, three Instagram-Shop feed mismatches. |
| Storefront & Site | 4 | Two broken canonical fixes, two GA4 tag-fire failures on the new bundle page. |
| Ops & Fulfilment | 3 | Three returns-policy URL drift findings, one between checkout and the order confirmation email. |
| Founders | 0 | Founders archive their bucket weekly; nothing carried over. |
| Total open | 15 | Below the 20-task warn threshold. |
- The headline is healthy. 15 open findings on a 9-person team is workable; on a Basecamp team specifically, this is the upper end of comfortable because Basecamp’s no-priority model means every open item competes equally for attention and a queue much beyond 20 starts to feel like noise.
- Marketing & Comms holds half the queue. Normal for a DTC brand mid-campaign. The five Spring meta-description findings will tail off naturally as the campaign winds down; the three Instagram-Shop feed items are the higher-leverage cluster because feed mismatches block the entire ad spend on that channel.
- The returns-policy drift trio in Ops is the most expensive finding cluster. Returns-policy mismatches between checkout, footer, and order confirmation are a known conversion killer. On a small team, this cluster is the right thing to pull forward this week regardless of count.
- Basecamp’s polling-only refresh adds up to 5 minutes of lag. Unlike Asana, Linear, or ClickUp, Basecamp does not yet emit to-do webhooks, so the count here always lags the team’s actual progress by up to one polling cycle. If a teammate just ticked complete, hit refresh in 5 minutes.
- Pair with Abandoned Findings. Basecamp’s lack of priority/status fields means stale to-dos are easy to miss; the abandoned-rate card does the work the tool itself doesn’t.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
On Basecamp specifically, open count alone is the queue depth signal. Basecamp gives you no priority/severity/sprint signal natively, so the sibling reads matter more here than on richer PM tools.| Card | Why it matters next to Findings Open | What the combination tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Abandoned Findings (>14d no movement) | The most important pair-card on Basecamp, because the tool itself does not flag stale items. | Open growing AND abandoned growing equals capacity problem; open growing but abandoned flat equals normal active churn. |
| Finding Resolution Rate (90d) | Tells you whether the team is keeping up with intake. | Resolution above 75% with open climbing equals over-finding by audit; below 50% equals execution problem. |
| Avg Time-to-Fix (days) | The headline cycle-time number for findings specifically. | A rising open count plus rising time-to-fix is the combined signal of a stretched team. |
| Tickets by Assignee | Basecamp supports assignees on to-dos, this card surfaces concentration. | If most open findings sit on one assignee, that’s a single-point-of-failure risk. |
| Throughput Weekly | How many to-dos the team closes per week, audit and non-audit combined. | Strong throughput with a stagnant findings count means audit work is being deprioritised against other Basecamp work. |
| Throughput Trend | The slope, not the level. | Climbing throughput with climbing open = audit programme is finding more, team is matching pace; flat throughput with climbing open = capacity wall. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Basecamp’s own UI:3.basecamp.com then open the project tagged in your connector setup. Click To-dos in the project nav, then open the Vortex IQ Findings to-do list. Open items appear in the main view; ticked items collapse into the Completed section at the bottom of the list. Basecamp does not have a global “all open to-dos across projects” dashboard, that is by design (the 37signals philosophy is that team-level focus beats organisation-wide rollups), so there is no single Basecamp screen that matches this card across multiple projects.For a per-list count, the bottom of the list shows “X to-dos” inclusive of completed; the count of unticked items is what this card measures. Basecamp’s Activity feed (project home → Activity) shows the trail of completions over time, useful for spot-checking sudden drops. Why our number may legitimately differ from Basecamp’s list view:
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Polling lag | Ours up to 5 min stale | Basecamp does not emit per-to-do webhooks; we poll every 5 minutes. A teammate who just ticked complete may not yet be reflected. |
| Time zone | Boundary day off | Basecamp’s UI uses your account-profile timezone for “today” filters. We align rolling windows to UTC. For a real-time count this rarely changes the number. |
| Archived projects | Ours lower | Archived buckets return no items via the API, matching what Basecamp’s UI shows when you toggle archived projects off. If you are looking at the archived project listing in Basecamp’s Adminland, you will see counts we exclude. |
| Multi-list within one project | Ours scoped | We count one named to-do list per project, Vortex IQ Findings by default. If a teammate manually moved findings into a different list, those drop out of our count. Re-map the source list in connector settings if this happens. |
| Multi-account aggregation | Ours wider | Basecamp’s UI scopes to one account at a time; we sum across all connected accounts. Pin a per-account stack panel to compare. |
| Card | Expected relationship | What causes the divergence |
|---|---|---|
datadog.dd_incidents_active | Independent. Datadog tracks live engineering incidents (server-side); Basecamp tracks the planned remediation work (audit-side). They should not be the same number. | A Datadog incident closed without a follow-up Basecamp to-do means the underlying cause may not be addressed. A Vortex IQ finding raised with no Datadog signal means it is content/SEO/catalogue, not infrastructure. |
newrelic.nr_open_incidents | Same shape. | Same divergence reasons. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
My Basecamp list shows 12 open to-dos but Vortex IQ says 15. Which is right? Both, almost always. The 3-item gap is the standard set of reasons in the reconcile section: polling lag (we poll every 5 minutes; a tick-complete from the last 5 minutes is not yet reflected), multi-account aggregation (we sum across connected Basecamp accounts; the UI scopes to one), and list scoping (we count one named to-do list per project; if a teammate moved items into a different list those drop out of our count). Refresh in 5 minutes and the gap usually closes. Why no priority or severity on Basecamp findings? Because Basecamp itself does not have priority or severity fields, that is the 37signals philosophy. The opinionated take is that priority is decided in the daily standup, not encoded in a tool. We respect this: every Vortex IQ finding written into Basecamp lands as a flat to-do, with the finding’s severity included in the body text rather than as a structured field. If priority signal matters to your operational process, ClickUp, Linear, Monday, and Smartsheet all expose priority as a structured column and should be considered as alternative routing destinations. We use Basecamp Classic, not Basecamp 3 / 4. Will this card work? No. Vortex IQ supports Basecamp 3 and Basecamp 4 (the BC3 API is the same surface, BC4 is a UI rebrand of BC3 with no breaking API changes). Basecamp 2 (Classic) uses a different API that 37signals has officially deprecated; we do not write findings to Classic projects. Migrate to Basecamp 4 if you want this connector. Open count dropped suddenly. What happened? Three usual causes, in order of likelihood. (1) A teammate did a bulk tick-complete (Basecamp’s Activity feed at the project home will show this, look for a cluster of “completed” entries with the same timestamp). (2) The mapped to-do list was renamed, archived, or deleted in Basecamp; the connector keeps pointing at the old list ID and starts returning zero. (3) The Basecamp project itself was archived, which makes all to-dos invisible to the API. A finding was important enough to fix manually but we never ticked the to-do. Do we need to close it? Yes. Basecamp’scompleted: true is the close signal Vortex IQ reads. If the work shipped but the to-do is still open, it stays in this count and contributes to abandoned-rate after 14 days of no movement. Tick complete (or use Basecamp’s keyboard shortcut c after selecting the to-do) once the work is done.
Is Basecamp the right PM tool for our context?
Basecamp shines for small teams (under 20 people) that prize calm process over feature richness, and for agencies that need a clean per-client project room with chat, files, schedule, and to-dos in one place. If your team is engineering-heavy and benefits from cycle-time/velocity machinery, Linear is a closer fit. If your team is marketing-and-agency-led with strong visual planning, Monday is its peer competitor. If your team needs custom statuses and per-task time-tracking, ClickUp covers more. Basecamp’s strength is exactly its restraint: fewer fields, fewer views, fewer dashboards. The cost is that operational discipline metrics like this card carry more weight, because the tool itself does not surface them.
Why doesn’t Basecamp have a workspace-wide “open to-dos” dashboard?
Because 37signals deliberately does not build them. The product philosophy is that cross-project rollups encourage management-style busywork and reduce team focus. We respect the philosophy by routing Vortex IQ findings to one project at a time, and by surfacing the cross-project rollup here in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre rather than asking Basecamp to produce one. If your operational reality genuinely needs a single-pane view across many Basecamp projects, this card is the substitute.
Today’s count looks volatile. Why?
At very low volumes, a single tick-complete or a single new finding moves the count by 10%+. The 30-day average shown beneath the headline is the steadier read for trend purposes; the headline is the live count. Basecamp teams typically see less volatility here than ClickUp or Monday teams because the team’s natural rhythm of ticking complete tends to be daily, not multiple times per hour.
Multiple Basecamp accounts (one per agency client). What does this card show?
It sums findings across every connected Basecamp account by default. Open the connector drawer and pin a per-account stack panel to see them broken out. Agencies running 5-10 client accounts often pin all of them and use this view as a portfolio-level health glance.