Setting up your pipeline

Where pipeline setup lives

In your account settings, open the Pipeline tab. Configuring it takes the same permission as most of account settings: Edit Account.

Your account has one pipeline. It is not a per-team or per-project setting: it drives the Projects board, every project's own stage display, the customer portal's tracker, and the sales app alike, wherever a stage is shown or a job moves.

Adding and ordering stages

Each stage on this screen has three basics: a Display name (whatever your team calls it), a Role (covered below), and a Color shown on the board. Drag a stage by its handle, or use the up and down arrow buttons, to reorder it; use Add stage to create a new one; the trash icon removes one, but only while no project has ever referenced it, current or historical.

A pipeline needs at least two stages, and every stage needs a unique display name and a valid color, before it can be saved.

If your pipeline has no stages at all, a Prefill defaults button appears and seeds a standard eight-stage funnel for you: Lead, Prospect, Approved, Completed, Invoiced, Closed, Dead, and Cancelled, one stage for each role described next. It only shows up while the pipeline is empty; once any stage is saved, you build on top of that instead.

Why a stage's role is not its name

Every stage carries two separate things: the name your team sees, and a fixed role that tells the rest of the system what the stage means. Naming a stage "Approved" does nothing by itself; only setting its role to won makes reporting, commissions, and automations treat it as the point a job is sold.

The roles are:

• lead: start of the funnel, where new leads land.
• custom: a free-form mid-funnel step, for anything your workflow needs between Lead and Won.
• won: the approved or booked job.
• completed: production, or the job itself, is finished.
• invoiced: invoiced and ready to collect.
• closed: administratively closed out.
• dead: lost, not moving forward (terminal).
• cancelled: a cancelled job (terminal).

Two rules keep the funnel unambiguous: you must have exactly one lead stage, and it has to be the first stage in funnel order; and you must have exactly one dead stage and exactly one cancelled stage. dead and cancelled are terminal, meaning they sit off to the side of the funnel rather than at its end, and a job sent to either one stops moving.

Every other role, custom, won, completed, invoiced, and closed, can be reused on more than one stage. This is deliberate: an account with two sign-off points, or two separate "in production" steps it wants to report on separately, can give more than one stage the same role. Because roles can repeat, never assume what a stage does from its role alone, or from its position: two differently named stages can both be won, and a renamed stage keeps whatever role it was already given. Always check the Role field itself.

closed, dead, and cancelled stages are left out of worklists such as the Action Required dashboard, since nothing is outstanding once a job reaches them.

Sub-stages

A stage can optionally carry sub-stages: finer steps inside it, for example "Framing" and "Roofing" inside one "In Production" stage. Sub-stages have their own Sub-stage name, reorder by dragging, and can be archived individually.

A sub-stage can also override its parent stage's role, but only to custom, won, completed, invoiced, or closed; it cannot take on lead, dead, or cancelled, which stay decided at the stage level. Left at the default, Inherit (parent stage), a sub-stage is a plain descriptive step with no effect on reporting. Overriding it is for pinning a real milestone, most often won, inside a stage that otherwise mirrors a broader grouping: a project sitting on that sub-stage is treated as won everywhere the role matters, even if its parent stage is custom.

A stage with no sub-stages simply shows no sub-stage picker to the people working a project on it.

Lead follow-up per stage

Each stage can set its own lead follow-up thresholds, on top of the account-wide default configured separately under Lead Follow-Up: how many days a lead can sit without a message from its assigned project manager before it is flagged, and then escalated. There are three modes:

• Use account default: inherits your account's configured day counts.
• Never flag this stage: opts a stage out entirely.
• Custom for this stage: your own flag and escalate day counts, from 1 to 90 days each, with the escalate count required to be higher than the flag count.

Only lead-role stages are followed up by default; on any other stage the default is "not tracked," and you have to choose Custom to include it anyway. This tab is hidden entirely on closed, dead, and cancelled stages, since there is nothing left to chase there. If lead follow-up tracking itself is turned off for your account, these per-stage settings still show, but have no effect until you turn it on.

Who can move a job

Each non-terminal stage has its own Who can move a job tab: a grid of roles against up to three actions, Move forward, Move back, and, only when the stage has sub-stages, Set sub-stage. Account Admin is always checked and cannot be removed, so a job can never get permanently stuck; Back Office, Branch Manager, and PM are each toggled independently, per stage and per action. Any cell you change from the platform default is marked, so a customized stage is easy to spot later.

Until you customize them, the defaults are:

• On the Lead stage: Account Admin, Back Office, Branch Manager, and PM can all move a job forward or set its sub-stage. Moving a job backward out of Lead is Account Admin and Back Office only.
• On every stage past Lead: only Account Admin and Back Office can move a job forward, backward, or change its sub-stage, until you specifically opt Branch Manager or PM into that stage.

This tab does not appear at all on dead or cancelled stages: a job sent there cannot be moved by anyone through the normal pipeline controls.

What changing the pipeline does to jobs already on it

The pipeline editor protects jobs that are already moving through it, but not every change is reversible, and some take effect immediately for jobs already in progress:

• Reordering stages is not just cosmetic. A job advances into whatever stage sits immediately next in your current order, so moving a stage changes what "next" means for any job already sitting ahead of it. Reordering also shifts stages relative to your won stage, and several reports, including accounts receivable, commission eligibility, and the pre- and post-approval windows, key off that relative position for jobs already in the pipeline, not only new ones.
• Deleting a stage is permanent, and is blocked forever once any job has touched it, current or in its history. In practice, on an account that has been live for a while, the trash icon stays disabled on almost every stage; archiving is the way out instead.
• Archiving retires a stage without deleting it. It removes the stage from the board, the project's own stage display, stage filters, and the customer portal, and any job that reaches it will skip straight past; history and reports for jobs that already passed through it are unaffected, and you can unarchive it later. You cannot archive a stage that a job is currently sitting on (move them out first), that provides a role the system resolves by role (lead, won, dead, or cancelled, even if that role lives on one of its sub-stages rather than the stage itself), or whose archiving would leave fewer than two stages unarchived. If any enabled automation rule names the stage, archiving is still allowed, but the confirmation names the automations that will stop firing, so you decide with that in view.
• Changing a stage's role is blocked once any job has passed through it. Create a new stage with the role you want instead of repurposing one that already has history.
• Removing a sub-stage that a job's history references is blocked, the same way removing a stage is.

Showing every stage on the board

By default, the Projects board only shows columns for the active funnel, hiding closed and the terminal dead and cancelled stages. A separate Show all stages on the board switch at the bottom of the Pipeline screen adds every stage, including those, as its own column. It only changes what the board itself shows; it does not change what is tracked anywhere else.