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Metrics type: Key MetricsCategory: Project Management
Tickets we created from audit findings that haven’t been resolved yet.

At a glance

The live count of Wrike tasks Vortex IQ created from audit findings that have not been moved to a Completed or Cancelled status. Wrike is the enterprise PM tool of choice for mid-market and enterprise marketing / ops teams (custom workflows, custom fields, resource management, time tracking, formal approval gates). Because Wrike workflows can be elaborate, “open” here means “not in any state mapped to the Wrike Completed group”, regardless of how many custom intermediate states the team has defined. This card is calibrated to enterprise rhythms, expect slower flow but more disciplined closures than on lightweight trackers.

Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Wrike (API) 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 US enterprise B2B brand on Adobe Commerce, ~120 person team. Marketing ops, performance, and ecommerce engineering all run delivery on Wrike, with a Storefront Operations Space configured as the connector target. Audit findings are dispatched into a sub-folder called VortexIQ Audit Backlog with a custom 5-state workflow. The custom workflow: Snapshot taken on 02 May 26 at 13:00 EDT.
Card reads 25 open, five above the alert threshold. The merchant clicks through and sees:
  • Of the 25 open, 10 are sitting in approval-gate states (Pending stakeholder + Pending approval). On Wrike enterprise workspaces this is the most common cause of a high open count, the work is done, the approvers are slow.
  • 6 of the Triaged items have customField.OwnerGroup = Marketing Ops and have not moved in 11+ days.
  • 4 of the In-progress items are tagged severity:critical (checkout-script Adobe Commerce errors flagged by Datadog).
What the merchant does: opens Wrike’s Approval Workflow report and pings the four named approvers blocking the 10 pending-gate tasks. Within 48 hours, 7 of those 10 close. The Marketing Ops triage items go onto the next standup. The 4 critical In-progress tasks were already on the engineering sprint and are mid-fix. Open count drops to 16, alert clears. Why the threshold is 20, not 10: enterprise Wrike workspaces routinely run 8-12 standing items in approval-gate states because the workflow demands legal / brand / compliance review on certain finding types. A 20-item ceiling absorbs that natural floor and only fires when the non-gate states are also full, which is the real “team is over capacity” signal. The dangerous reading: open count above 30 with the Pending stakeholder state holding more than 50% of the volume. That is the “approval-gate logjam” pattern, the team has done the work but the organisation cannot absorb decisions fast enough. Vortex IQ pages owner + operations and recommends an org-level intervention (delegate approval authority, async-by-default, or batch approvals weekly). Compare to a Jira-led peer. A similar-size enterprise on Jira typically runs at 12-18 standing open findings on the same audit feed, lower than Wrike at 25 mostly because Jira’s lighter approval gating means fewer items sit in Pending states. Same intake, same throughput, different gating model. Neither tool is wrong; the 20 threshold reflects Wrike’s enterprise reality.

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Wrike’s own dashboard:
Wrike workspace → open the Space configured on the connector → use the Filter button → set Custom field "Source" equals vortexiq AND Status group is Active OR Custom OR Deferred → the result count in the filter footer matches this card.
For Business / Enterprise plans, Wrike’s Reports feature can render the same query as a saved chart, Reports → New Report → tasks → filter by Source field → group by status → exclude Completed and Cancelled groups. The total reconciles within polling lag. Why our number may legitimately differ from Wrike: Cross-connector reconciliation:

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Why is my Wrike open count higher than my peer brand’s Jira count for the same intake? Wrike’s enterprise workflows include formal approval gates that Jira does not enforce by default. A finding that goes straight to Done on Jira often makes a stop in Pending stakeholder or Pending approval on Wrike, which inflates standing open counts by 30-50% on most enterprise workspaces. The 20-item threshold for Wrike calibrates against this; do not compare absolute open counts across the two tools without normalising for gate dwell-time. My team uses Wrike’s approval workflow on every audit task. The open count is always above 20. Should I worry? Probably not. If 50%+ of your open count is consistently in approval-gate states, the workflow is doing what it should, the throughput sibling card is a better signal than the open-count card for your specific setup. Pin the Resolution Rate card on the dashboard instead and let it be the headline; treat the open count as a secondary indicator. The auto-router put a critical Datadog finding into Wrike instead of Jira. Why? Two possibilities. (1) The routing rule for that severity / domain pair points at Wrike intentionally; check Vortex IQ → Settings → Audit routing. (2) Jira was unreachable when the dispatcher fired (auth token expired, organisation suspended), and the dispatcher fell back to the configured secondary tracker. Critical findings should always have Jira (or another paging-capable tracker) as primary, set Wrike as fallback only. Why does this card matter to a non-engineering merchant? Because Wrike is increasingly the system of record for marketing operations, brand-led teams, and cross-functional initiatives that touch ecommerce. If the open count is rising, your marketing-ops team is collecting more audit findings than they are acting on, which over weeks shows up as “the brand audit issues never get resolved”. This card is the early-warning version of that complaint, surfaced before the next QBR. A teammate manually added the vortexiq:finding tag to a Wrike task they created. Will it count? Yes. The tag is the filter. Manual additions count, by design (anyone on the team can promote a task into VortexIQ tracking). The downside is that manual additions do not get a vortexiqFindingId custom field, so they cannot be deduplicated against the audit feed, if the dispatcher later creates a finding for the same issue, you may see two tasks for one underlying problem. My Wrike Space has multiple sub-folders for different product areas. Are they all counted? Yes. The configured Space scans recursively, so tasks in Storefront Operations / Apparel / VortexIQ Audit Backlog count the same as tasks in Storefront Operations / Footwear / VortexIQ Audit Backlog. If you want per-area counts, configure separate connector instances pointing at the leaf folders, which gives you per-area cards on the Nerve Centre. Can I trust Wrike’s webhooks for real-time updates? On Business and Enterprise plans, yes. Wrike’s webhook delivery is reliable and median-latency 300-700ms. On Free / Professional plans, polling is your only option and the count can lag up to 60 seconds. If the merchant is making decisions based on minute-by-minute readings, upgrade to Business. Should this number ever be zero? No, and zero usually indicates a problem. Audit detection runs continuously and enterprise teams have steady intake; zero either means auto-dispatch is broken (findings not reaching Wrike), the Source custom field is misconfigured, or the team has bypassed Wrike entirely. A healthy enterprise Wrike workspace shows 8-18 standing items at any moment. The count dropped sharply after we re-organised the Space. Is something wrong? Three usual causes. (1) Tasks were moved to a Space the connector cannot see, reconnect or move them back. (2) The bulk re-org changed the Source custom field on tasks (Wrike’s bulk-edit can be aggressive), restore the field via Wrike’s audit log. (3) The team moved tasks into the Recycle Bin during the cleanup, those are excluded from the count immediately even though Wrike’s UI may still show them for 30 days. Wrike has a “Backlogged” status group concept. How is it treated here? Wrike’s Deferred group is what most teams call “backlogged” (work that is intentionally on hold). This card counts Deferred tasks as open because they represent unfinished work the team has committed to. If you want to exclude truly long-deferred items (e.g. parked-indefinitely), move them to Cancelled with a won't fix reason; do not leave them in Deferred where they continue to inflate the count.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

VortexIQ Findings Open is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Wrike (API) 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.