Stages & automatic movement

A pipeline record's stage moves in exactly two ways: a manual change made in the record detail modal, or an automatic move made by a background process reacting to real activity — an open, a click, a bounce, or a reply. Every move, manual or automatic, is written to the record's history and can be undone.

The seven stages

Every record starts at Active. The first six read as one forward chain in that order; Disqualified stands apart from the chain — it's reachable from any stage, at any time, automatically or manually.

Changing a stage manually

The record detail modal has a Change stage control — a dropdown offering all seven stages, plus an optional free-text reason (up to 1,000 characters), plus a Change Stage button. A manual change isn't restricted to the forward chain or to any particular order: you can set a record to any of the seven stages from any of the other six, including moving it backward.

Automatic movement

A background process checks for queued activity once a minute and applies stage moves on its own, with no one clicking anything. Every one of the signals below is queued the moment the underlying event happens; the once-a-minute check is what actually applies it.

Two firm rules govern whether a queued signal actually moves anything:

• The Active → Engaged → Interested → Meeting Requested chain is forward-only. A signal can move a record further along this chain, but never backward, and never skip based on the record's rank relative to the target — a record already at Interested ignores an incoming "move to Engaged" signal as a no-op, not a downgrade.
• Disqualified is the one exception. A disqualifying signal (hard bounce, unsubscribe, or a Not Interested tag/classification) moves a record to Disqualified from any stage, at any time — including from Meeting Booked or Handed to Client.

History and undo

Every stage change — manual or automatic — writes one entry to the record's history, shown oldest to newest in the detail modal: the stage it moved from and to, who or what caused it, a timestamp, and the reason if one was given.

Every entry gets an Undo button except two kinds: the record's original creation entry (there's nothing "before" it to revert to), and an entry that's already been undone (which shows "Undone {time}" in place of the button). Clicking Undo doesn't delete anything — it writes a new history entry that moves the record from wherever it is right now back to that old entry's "from" stage, so the full history keeps growing rather than being rewritten. Undo isn't limited to the single most recent entry — you can undo any earlier, not-yet-undone entry in the log too.

Where to go next

Next: Health score

• Pipeline overview
• Estimated value & currency
• Reply Box overview
• Auto-pause and bounce handling