Project Statuses: customizing and use

The default project statuses are in four categories:

• Tentative

• Confirmed

• Completed

• Cancelled

You may add as many sub-statuses of each in those categories. Even the default statuses may also be renamed if you don’t use the same terminology in your company. You do both on the Project statuses settings page, under Settings > Projects > Statuses.

Tentative statuses: 50 shades of tentative

You are likely to follow the deals in a CRM. The pipeline stage names are reflected in the deal that is associated to the project.

You may want to add more steps to the process of staffing tentative work. For example, in a company where staffing managers may become a bottleneck for the successful project kickoff, you might want to explicitly say that “Pending final team setup” is a separate status – that would indicate for example that the project could otherwise be confirmed but the team is still undecided.

Each Tentative status also decides whether its projects take new time entries and expenses, with its Time entries and Expenses switches. A new Tentative status starts with both off.

See example below:

Everything that can be filed under Confirmed

Confirmed is the status where most projects spend the biggest percentage of their lifecycle.

• The project is won; but the start date might be slightly unclear

• The start date is set but in the future

• Project is ongoing

• Project is paused but will continue

• Project is 99% complete but some final things such as time entry edits, expenses or the last invoice might still get sent

• The finance team wants to get all the details right before the project is filed away in an archive

Some of these statuses most definitely allow new time entries, expenses and invoices to be created. Some of these most definitely do not. You know best!

Each Confirmed status has Time entries, Expenses and Invoices switches, so you set this per status. They start on for a new Confirmed status. When a switch is off, projects in that status take no new items of that kind, but the items they already have stay editable.

Completed: happy endings

Completed is something that no longer is editable. The financials and time-related things are final. If you need to make edits to them, you will have to revert it back to confirmed, edit, and complete it again.

Completing a project also ends its plan on that day. Allocations and budgets still running end today, and tentative allocations and the allocations and budgets that start later are removed. Moving the project back to confirmed does not restore them. Statuses in Operating shows what the completion dialog tells you before you confirm.

A custom status under Completed could be Pending reference case, for example, if your company has a process for creating one about each and every past engagement.

Cancelled: never happened

This is the bucket where tentative things go when they’re never confirmed. It’s super valuable data for your future analyses to see what was offered, and later declined by the client (perhaps the project plan & team was amazing but you got the silver medal due to price, for example) or by you. If you’d like to organize the cases under different categories like “lost reason”, feel free to do so.

All plans in cancelled projects are kept, but are not visible in reports. You may resurrect a cancelled project back to tentative or confirmed.

Confirmed and completed projects can be cancelled too, unless they have been billed. A project with an invoice, a credit note or a time entry marked as invoiced cannot be cancelled, so complete it instead. Cancelling a confirmed or completed project makes its allocations tentative, and reopening it as confirmed makes them confirmed again.