Statuses & workflows

Every work item and every project has a status. Your workspace decides what the statuses are called, what colour they have and, most importantly, what each one means. This guide is for people who move work through them and for administrators who maintain the list. It also covers what "workflow" does and does not mean for work items.

1. What a status is

A status has a name, a colour (Blue, Purple, Red, Green, Amber or Grey) and a meaning. The meaning is what the rest of groupforce reads, never the name:

Meaning	What it tells groupforce
Not started	Waiting to be picked up. Counts as no progress.
In progress	Someone is on it, or it is held up. Counts as half done on the Gantt.
Done	Finished. Never overdue; full progress on the Gantt.
Cancelled	Finished without being done. Never overdue.

So you can rename "Done" to "Shipped", or add "Waiting for customer" with the meaning In progress, and overdue marks, boards, the dashboard and the Gantt all keep working. The list is per workspace: work items have one list and projects have another. It is not per project and not per type, so a ticket and a task choose from the same statuses.

A new workspace starts with these:

For	Name	Meaning	Colour
Work items	Open	Not started	Blue
Work items	In progress	In progress	Purple
Work items	Blocked	In progress	Red
Work items	Done	Done	Green
Projects	Active	In progress	Green
Projects	Archived	Done	Grey

2. Moving work between statuses

Any status that is on the list can follow any other. There are no allowed-transition rules for work items or projects. You change a work item's status from the status pill in the item header, by dragging its card on a status board, or by typing /status in the comment box. Each change appears in the item's history under the status's name.

A new work item or project starts in the first status on the list, so the order your administrator chose decides the default. The list marks it "New work items start here".

Archiving a project is a status change too. Archive project puts the project in the first status on the list whose meaning is Done or Cancelled, and Restore project puts it in the first status on the list.

3. Administrators: managing the list

Open Workspace settings → Work items. The tabs Work items and Projects switch between the two lists. Everyone can read the list. Only administrators see the buttons.

To	Do this	Good to know
Add a status	Add status, then give a Name, what it Means and a Colour.	The preview shows how the pill will look. Two offered statuses cannot share a name. A list holds at most 100 statuses per kind, archived ones included.
Rename or recolour	The pencil on its row.	Records keep working: they hold an internal key made from the first name ("Waiting for customer" becomes `waiting_for_customer`), and the key never changes.
Reorder	The up and down arrows.	The first status is the default for new records.
Archive	The archive icon, then pick Move its work items to a replacement.	The replacement is required when anything is in the status. The records move to it, and so do board columns. History keeps the old name. You cannot archive the last status on a list.
Restore	The restore icon in the Archived section.	It is offered again at the end of the list.
Delete	The trash icon in the Archived section.	Only for a status nothing has ever been in. Anything that was used can only be archived, because history names it.

When an archive moves records, open views update at once and each item's history shows an ordinary status change. Nobody is notified: it is an administrator tidying the workspace, not news about the work.

4. Boards and statuses

A status column that has no name of its own is called whatever its status is called, so renaming a status renames its columns everywhere. Archiving a status removes or rewrites the columns that showed it (a board that already has a column for the replacement loses the old one). The built-in board always has one column per status on the list. A saved board does not gain a column when you add a status afterwards; add it with Edit Columns.

An item whose status was archived without moving it keeps that status and still opens. Changing anything else on it works. To give it a different status you pick one that is currently offered. On a Kanban board it appears in the Other column.

5. Statuses added by apps

An installed app can bring statuses its process needs, up to 20 per app (this needs an app built for extension contract 2). The install dialog lists them before you approve. They appear in the list with the app's id under Added by, you can reorder them, but you cannot edit, archive or delete them there. Disable or uninstall the app, or install an update that no longer declares one, and the status is archived rather than deleted: work already in it keeps it and its name. Enable or reinstall the app and it is offered again. If you build apps, see Processes, roles & automations.

6. Workflows

For work items and projects, a status is a label with a meaning, not a gate. Nobody can be blocked from moving an item from one status to another, and there is no approval step built into the statuses themselves.

Rules about who may do what next are the job of an app workflow. An app can give one of its own record types a state machine: named steps from one state to another, who may take each step (the record's creator, a person or group field on the record, a named group or role, or a group chosen in the app's settings), whether a comment is required, which fields must be filled in first, and who is told. On such a record the state changes only by taking a step, and each step is written to the record's history. These workflows belong to the app's own record types. They do not add rules to work items.

Need approval steps? An app can model them as its own record type with a workflow. Processes, roles & automations shows how an app declares one in App Studio.

What's next

Next: Group assignees and admin-only notes, then Projects, where project statuses and archiving are put to use.