The things that make a Wrike account hard to use accumulate quickly. Over time, they make the account slower to work in and harder to report from.
Account cleanup should always be tackled proactively. General cleanup and optimisation is the most consistent priority for accounts that were set up years ago and have grown with the organisation. The goal is to clean up and to establish a sustainable cycle of regular maintenance.
Custom fields and Custom Item Types come next. The field overload problem is one of the most common Wrike admin complaints. Too many fields, many of them duplicates or near-duplicates, make every task view harder to read and every report harder to build.
Using naming conventions with department prefixes in brackets makes it always clear which department owns a field when looking at a task with fields from multiple teams.
Spaces and folder management are the third priority. Duplicate folders, outdated project structures, spaces that were created for temporary purposes and never removed, these accumulate in any account that has been running for more than a year or two.
Running continuous cleanup without it all falling on one person requires delegated governance. Have department Wrike champions who are accountable for their team’s spaces, workflows, and request forms. Space admins are responsible for reviewing what is in their space at least quarterly. Give the clear rules about what requires account-admin approval versus what can be handled at the space level.
Automations can move completed projects to archive folders, removing the manual step of individually archiving items. There is likely more you could be doing to automate the maintenance cycle beyond that.
Where to start
Start with custom fields. They are the highest-impact cleanup since they affect every task view and every report across the account. Open the unified custom field view in account settings. Identify obvious duplicates. Run the staged deletion process on anything you want to remove. Set a rule for how custom fields are created going forward: any new field requires a description, an owner, and approval from an admin before it is created.
After custom fields, move to request forms. Identify which ones have not been used recently, switch them to inactive, and review whether the ones in active use are still asking the right questions. Then workflows. Then spaces. A rotation through these four areas once a quarter keeps the account in reasonable shape without requiring a major cleanup project every year.