Epic templates: set up recurring work once, start it in seconds

Some work is never new. A colleague joins and somebody prepares a contract, orders a laptop, creates accounts, plans a first day and checks in after a month. A client signs and the same intake starts again. The steps barely change. What changes is the name, the date and a handful of details, and the part that goes wrong is the step somebody forgot.

So far, most teams handle this with a checklist in a document, a card they copy, or someone who simply remembers. Epic templates replace all three. You describe the process once, and every next time it is one form away.

One epic, all its stories, already filled in

An epic template is a blueprint for an epic and the stories that always come with it. Take onboarding:

• The epic is called Onboarding {{full_name}}.
• The stories are the steps: Prepare the contract for {{first_name}}, Create accounts and access for {{first_name}}, Introduce {{first_name}} to the team, and so on.
• The template asks for the details each time: full name, first name, job title, start date, hours per week, the laptop they need.

When you create an epic from it, Scrumpy asks for those details and fills them in everywhere: in the epic name, in the descriptions and in every story title. A minute later the onboarding of Sofia Martens is on the board, with nine stories that already say what to do and for whom.

Fields can be short text, long text or a date, and required or optional. Dates are written the way your team reads them, so "2 November 2026" for some and "November 2, 2026" for others.

Assigned to a role, not to a person

People change jobs, go on holiday and swap tasks, so a template that assigns every story to a fixed name goes stale quickly. In Scrumpy, a template story can go to a fixed member or to whoever holds a role, such as HR, IT, payroll or the manager. The role is resolved when the epic is created, and the same person gets all of that role's stories for the whole epic.

Each story can also get its own story type. On an onboarding board that might be Pre-boarding, Onboarding and Post-boarding, so the board shows at a glance which phase each colleague is in.

A due date that skips the weekend

A template can set the epic's due date from one of its date fields, plus or minus a number of days: "five working days after the start date", for example. Working days are the default, so the due date never ends on a Saturday or a Sunday. If you would rather count calendar days, untick the box.

Paste the email, let AI fill in the form

The details of a new colleague usually arrive in an email or an HR form, not in neat fields. So the create form has a box where you paste that text, press Fill in fields, and the AI picks out the name, the start date, the job title and the rest. You check what it found and adjust where needed. It only reads the text you paste, only when you ask, and the text is not kept once you close the form.

The parts that keep it practical

• Pick the stories. Not every onboarding needs every step. Untick the stories that don't apply before you create the epic.
• A color per epic. You choose the epic's color when you create it, and Scrumpy suggests one that no open epic uses yet. With five people starting in the same month, every onboarding has its own color on the board.
• Save an epic as a template. Already ran the process by hand once? Save that epic as a template and turn the parts that change into fields.
• Every change is kept. Anyone on the team can improve a template, so each one keeps a history of who changed what and when, down to "Added story Order a laptop".
• Story templates for single stories. For one-off stories with a familiar shape, like a bug report, story templates prefill the type, priority, points and description.

Scrum, kanban, or both

Epic templates were built with an HR team in mind, but they are not only about HR. A release checklist for a scrum team, a client intake for an agency, offboarding for IT, a quarterly audit for finance: anything that repeats with a few different details fits. And because Scrumpy runs scrum teams with sprints and simple kanban boards side by side in one organization, the development team and the HR team can each work the way that suits them.

We looked at how other tools handle this. Most can copy a project with its tasks, and some can shift all dates from a new start date. Filling the details of each run into the epic and its stories usually takes an add-on or an automation rule someone has to build and maintain. In Scrumpy it is part of the board.

Try it

The fastest way to see it is the live demo: pick Paula, open Epics and choose From template to start an onboarding from the Employee onboarding template. If you want it for your own team, start a free 7-day trial with every feature included and no credit card required.