How the pipeline works
Jobs, tasks, and subtasks — what each layer is for, and how to decide which one you need.
Work in LedgerOS has three layers. Getting them straight early saves a lot of rearranging later.
The three layers
Job — a piece of work you agreed to do for a client. 2025 tax season for Henderson LLC. A job holds the tasks that deliver it.
Task — a unit of work someone owns and moves through a pipeline. Prepare the 1120S. A task has one assignee, one status, one due date.
Subtask — a step inside a task. Reconcile the bank accounts. Subtasks don't have their own assignee or date.
Which one do you need
The test is ownership.
If two different people own two parts of it, those are two tasks, not one task with subtasks. A task has a single assignee, so splitting work across people means splitting the task.
If it's one person's job and the parts are just their sequence of steps, that's subtasks.
If it's a body of work spanning several people and several months that you'd describe to the client as one thing, that's an job.
Pipelines and statuses
Every task belongs to a pipeline — a type of work, like Monthly bookkeeping or 1040. Each pipeline has its own statuses, which are the stages work moves through.
Statuses carry a role underneath the name, telling LedgerOS what the stage means. That's what makes questions like "everything waiting on a client, across every pipeline" answerable.
Where you'll see it
Tasks is the list view — filterable, sortable, and the right place for cross-cutting questions.
Pipeline is the board view, showing one pipeline's statuses as columns with work as cards.
A client's Tasks tab shows everything open for that client regardless of job.
Most people pick one as their landing page and work from there.
Where work comes from
- Created by hand, when something one-off comes up.
- From a template, which builds a standard set of tasks in one action.
- From a recurring schedule, which creates the same work each period without anyone asking.
- From an automation, where finishing one thing spawns the next.
By the second season most of a firm's work is arriving from the last three rather than being typed in.
Notes and limits
- A task belongs to one pipeline. Changing pipeline means changing which statuses apply.
- Tasks can exist without a job. Not everything needs the extra layer.
- Subtasks can gate their task's progress, depending on the pipeline's settings.