Move work through stages

There is no single stages menu. Each application keeps its own, and the path is worth writing down because two of them are hidden until you turn something on.

Most stage work is faster from the board than from the configuration list, and none of it needs developer mode.

Each column heading carries a ⚙ icon. It opens a short menu: Fold, which collapses that column for you until you reload; Edit, which opens the stage itself in a dialog titled Edit: <stage name>; and Delete, in red. Edit and Delete only appear when you have the rights for them.

Deleting asks first — “Are you sure you want to delete this column?” — and the confirm button is Delete. Move the cards out before you delete a column that still holds any.

To the right of the ⚙ is a + that creates a card straight into that column. At the far end of the board a narrow strip marked with a double chevron » creates a new column: click it, type a name in the box that opens — whose placeholder is the grouping field's own name, Stage… — then confirm with the tick or cancel with the cross.

Dragging a whole column sideways changes the order of the stages for everyone, not just for you. Dragging is the same edit as changing Sequence on the stage record.

The list at CRM › Configuration › Pipeline › Stages shows the stages in pipeline order with a drag handle at the start of each row. Stage Name is read-only in the list, so open a row to rename it. Two more columns, Days to rot and Color, are hidden by default and can be switched on from the column picker at the far end of the header row.

Opening a stage gives a short form. Two of its fields hide themselves, which is worth knowing before you conclude a setting is missing.

A pipeline does not simply show every stage in the list. It shows the stages that are shared with all teams, plus the stages assigned to the team you are looking at, plus any stage that already holds one of the cards on screen — which is why a column you thought you had retired can reappear when someone leaves a card in it.

Team assignment reaches further than the board. A new opportunity is placed in the first stage, in sequence order, that is not folded and that serves its team. If you later move an opportunity to a different team and its current stage does not serve that team, its stage is reset to that team's first non-folded stage. Nothing announces this, so check the board after a re-assignment.

Days to rot is the board's own nagging. Set it to a number of days on a stage, and any card that has sat in that stage longer than that is flagged.

The flag is a pink day-count badge on the card — 5d, 7d — and a pink count badge beside the stage's progress bar telling you how many of them there are.

Two details decide whether you will ever see it. First, the clock starts at the last stage change, not at the last time anyone touched the record — a card you have been emailing about daily still rots if it has not moved. Second, in the opportunity pipeline only open opportunities can rot: leads do not, and neither do opportunities already marked won or lost.

Set the threshold from the stage record, either through the configuration list or through ⚙ › Edit on the column heading. Changing it does not retroactively re-date cards that were already sitting there before the change.

The coloured bar above each column is not a completion meter. It breaks the cards in that column down by whatever field the board was built to track, and the field differs per board.

On the opportunity pipeline the field is the state of each card's scheduled activity: green for planned, orange for due today, red for overdue, and grey for cards with no activity at all. The board's own tooltip says so — “This bar allows to filter the opportunities based on scheduled activities.” On the project task board the same bar is broken down by the task's state instead.

The figure beside the bar is a total, not a count: in the pipeline it is the sum of Expected Revenue for the column.

Hover a coloured segment and a tooltip gives its count and label. Click it and the column narrows to just those cards, with the count shown next to the bar; click the same segment again to release it.

Sending something automatically when a card lands in a stage is a project feature, not a pipeline one. Opportunity stages have no template fields at all, and no amount of dragging in the pipeline will send a customer an email by itself.

Project task stages and project stages each carry two fields: Email Template, which sends the chosen template to the customer when a record reaches that stage, and SMS Template, which does the same by text message. Pick an existing template, or type a new name and choose Create and edit to build one on the spot. Task stages additionally offer a Rating Email Template, which asks the customer for feedback either on arrival or on a repeating schedule.

Task stages also carry a Stage Owner, the person tasks in that stage default to.

The word folded is used by three different stage models and means something slightly different in each. This is the single most common source of wrong reporting on a board.

A stage is missing from the board. Either it is folded and empty, or it belongs to another sales team, or nobody has ever put a card in it. Open the stage list to see the full set.

Dragging a card does nothing. Check what the board is grouped by first — a board grouped by anything other than stage cannot be reordered by dragging into a column. If it is grouped by stage, you do not have write access to that card.

There is no add-column strip, or the ⚙ menu has no Edit or Delete. You are missing the rights to change stages. For the pipeline that is the Sales Administrator role; ask an administrator rather than looking for a hidden setting.

The Sales Teams field is not on the stage form. The database has only one sales team, so WindoorERP hides a field with nothing to choose in it. Create a second team and the field appears.

Days to rot is not on the stage form. Is Won Stage? is ticked on that stage, which hides it. Untick it if the stage was not meant to be the won stage.

Nothing ever rots. Check three things in order: the threshold is not 0; the cards are opportunities rather than leads; and they are neither won nor lost. Remember too that the count starts from the last stage change, so a card that moved yesterday starts again from zero.

Probabilities all jumped to 100%. Somebody ticked Is Won Stage? on a stage that still held live opportunities. Un-ticking it recomputes them, but hand-entered probabilities are not recoverable.

An opportunity changed stage on its own. Its sales team changed and the stage it was in does not serve the new team, so it was reset to that team's first open stage.

“Are you sure you want to delete this column?” — this is the confirmation before a stage is deleted, not a warning about the cards. Cancel, move the cards out, then delete.

Two boards have different columns and one of them looks wrong. They are different stage lists. Opportunity stages, project stages, task stages, installation stages and technical request stages are five separate sets of records that happen to share a word.