Currently you can set a word count target on a text document. You can also see a cumulative count on a parent document or folder. However, you can’t set a target on a parent document or folder. I would like to be able to do that.
I use one document per topic I need to cover and that becomes a child of a parent section or essay. The targets I need to meet are always per-essay, not topic. As a workaround I can view the cumulative count. But it would be nice to be able to set a target at any level of the hierarchy.
Have you tried adding a goal to the container itself? That should be working fine, but do note you’ll get better feedback by using the “Total” outliner columns for tracking group sums. Note that because you only see the target button in the footer bar when looking at one text document, you may need to toggle Scrivenings mode off after clicking on the container item, otherwise you will just see the overall progress bar in the footer (and naturally this button will not be available when viewing the container as a Corkboard, etc.).
Alternatively you can manage this from the Outliner by adding the appropriate custom columns:
