#BLOCKED / Auto-Save Issue in Project Billing Forecast Report

hanna_arete_anubis

We are still facing a critical #BLOCKED / Invalid Value issue in our Project Billing Forecast Report.

📌 Current behavior:

• In the underlying Sheets, formulas (e.g., Total Billed This Period, To Date Billed) initially show #BLOCKED/Invalid Value, then refresh to correct numbers.
• However, the Sheet does not auto-save this correction.
• As a result, the Report keeps showing #BLOCKED unless we manually press Save.

📌 Context:

• The issue appeared after updating formulas (Previous Application, Complete This Period, Total line) and running a Global Update (Find & Replace) through Control Center.
• We also saw a similar case earlier with API integration (daily writes into Sheets), where it looked like the values were written but not saved.

📌 Observation:
We suspect this may be an internal Smartsheet bug rather than just API or Control Center behavior.
It feels like each Sheet has two states:

• a saved state,
• and an editable state.

Formulas seem to pull results from the saved state, but writes are happening in the editable state, causing a mismatch. This could explain why the Report is pulling #BLOCKED values until a manual Save reconciles both states.

📌 Why it matters:
This has become critical for us. This problem is now blocking billing forecasts for clients.

➡️ Has anyone found a way to force auto-save after formula refresh or API updates?
➡️ Smartsheet team – can this be escalated urgently?

Thanks for help,

Hanna

Paul Newcome

I have seen this happen on rare occasion, and I have always had to reach out to Support to get it resolved as it is some bug on the back end.