Statuses and pipelines
Build the columns your firm actually works in, and control what the client sees at each stage.
A pipeline is a type of work — Monthly bookkeeping, 1040, Payroll. Each pipeline has its own statuses, which are the stages that work moves through.
Getting this right early is worth the hour it takes. Statuses drive your boards, your filters, what your clients see, and eventually what your automations fire on.
Where to find it
Create a pipeline
- Click New pipeline.
- Give it a Name — for example, Monthly bookkeeping.
- Add the Stages work moves through.
- Set a Role on each status.
Most firms end up with somewhere between three and eight pipelines. One per service line is a reasonable starting point.
Status roles
Every status carries a role. This is the single most important setting on this page, and the one most often skipped.
The name of a status is yours — call it whatever your firm calls it. The role tells LedgerOS what that stage means, so the software can behave sensibly without guessing from the label.
Six roles:
- Open — not started
- Active — being worked
- Waiting · client — blocked on the client
- In review — with a reviewer
- Ready — done internally, not yet closed out
- Complete — finished
So a status called With Marcus for second look has the role In review, and Chasing signatures has the role Waiting · client. Two firms with completely different vocabulary both get correct behaviour, because the roles line up underneath.
Reaching a Complete status is what closes a task out. In the active task list, moving a task to a Complete-role status fades it out of the view — the work is done, so it leaves the stage.
What the client sees
Each status has separate client-facing settings, which is where a lot of the polish lives.
- Client sees / Set label — give the status a different name for the portal. Internally Prep — Marcus; to the client, In progress. Your staffing is not their business.
- A status can be hidden from the client entirely, so an internal stage doesn't appear on their timeline at all.
- A status can carry a banner message shown in the portal, with a tone — neutral, info, positive, action, or warning. Use action for the stages where you need them to do something.
Use the Live preview while you're editing to see the effect rather than guessing.
Auto-advance
A status can be set to auto-advance, moving work along automatically when its conditions are met rather than waiting for someone to drag a card.
Pipelines also carry defaults for how subtasks behave — whether all subtasks must complete before the task can advance, and whether subtasks unlock in order.
Free movement
Each pipeline has a free-movement setting, controlling whether work can jump between any two statuses or must follow the order you defined. Firms with a genuine review gate usually want the constrained version.
Notes and limits
- Deleting a pipeline that has work in it is guarded — you'll be offered Keep pipeline rather than losing the tasks attached to it.
- Statuses belong to a pipeline. Two pipelines can both have a status called Review and they're separate things.
- Renaming a status is safe and applies everywhere immediately.
- Changing a status's role changes behaviour, not just labelling. Check your saved views afterwards.