Customising Job Stages and Status Labels
Trade2Base ships with a set of default job stages that cover most trade workflows. This guide explains how to view, edit, and extend those stages to match exactly how your business operates — and how to wire each stage to automations so the right messages go out at the right time.
Viewing your default job stages
Go to Settings → Job Stages. You'll see a list of every stage currently active in your account, along with its colour label and any automations attached to it. Trade2Base starts you with eight default stages:
- New Enquiry
- Quote Sent
- Job Booked
- In Progress
- Parts Ordered
- Awaiting Sign-off
- Complete
- Invoiced
These defaults cannot be deleted, but they can be renamed, recoloured, and reordered to suit your branding and workflow.
Adding a custom stage
Click + Add Stage at the bottom of the stage list. Give the stage a name — for example Parts Ordered or Awaiting Sign-off — then choose a colour to represent it in the calendar and Kanban views.
- Enter a Stage name (maximum 40 characters).
- Pick a Colour from the palette or enter a hex code.
- Optionally write a short Description — this appears as a tooltip for your team inside the job view.
- Click Save Stage.
Your new stage is immediately available in the job stage dropdown and on the Kanban board.
Reordering stages by drag-and-drop
The order of your stages determines the left-to-right sequence on the Kanban board and the order in the stage dropdown on each job. To reorder:
- In Settings → Job Stages, hover over a stage row.
- Click and hold the drag handle (six dots) on the left side of the row.
- Drag the row up or down to its new position.
- Release — the order saves automatically.
Setting stages to trigger automations
Each job stage can trigger one or more automations when a job moves into it. Click the Automations tab on any stage row to configure:
- WhatsApp update — send a message to the customer confirming the job status change (e.g. “Your parts have been ordered and we'll be back in touch shortly.”).
- Review request — automatically send a Google review link when a job moves to Complete.
- Invoice generation — automatically draft an invoice when a job moves to Invoiced or a custom billing stage.
Automation triggers are configured in Settings → Automations — the stage selector there will reflect any custom stages you've created.
Archiving unused stages
If a stage is no longer relevant — for example a previous owner created a Legacy Review stage — you can archive it rather than delete it. Archiving hides the stage from new job dropdowns while preserving the historical data on any jobs that used it.
Click the three-dot menu on a stage row and select Archive. Archived stages appear in a collapsed “Archived” section at the bottom of the Settings page and can be restored at any time.
How stages appear on the calendar and job list
In the Calendar view, each job block displays its current stage colour as a left-hand bar, making it easy to see where every job stands at a glance.
In the Job List view, you can filter by one or more stages using the Stage filter chip at the top. You can also group jobs by stage — switching the list into a Kanban-style column view directly from the list toolbar.
On the Dashboard, the “Jobs by Stage” widget shows a live count for every active stage so you can spot bottlenecks instantly.
Still need help?
Contact our UK support team via live chat or email support@trade2base.com.