Tasks, statuses and due dates
Add a task against a client or a job, give it an owner and a date, and move it through the statuses your firm actually uses rather than a fixed set somebody else chose.
Adding one
- From a client or an engagement, choose Add task — or New task from the client's own page.
- Say what it is. A title somebody else could act on beats a note to yourself.
- Set Assigned to and Due. Both are optional and both are what make it findable later.
A task attached to an engagement belongs to that job. A task attached only to a client is the work that is real but does not sit inside a job — the call you owe them, the letter to chase.
Your firm's own statuses
Statuses are yours to name. What Vylan fixes is not the words but the three buckets underneath them, so that every screen agrees on what "in flight" means:
- Not started — accepted, nobody has begun.
- In progress — somebody is on it.
- Done — finished.
Call yours whatever your firm says out loud. The bucket is what the work list counts and what an automation checks when a stage is waiting for its tasks to be finished, so a status you invent still behaves correctly everywhere.
Kinds are the other half of the vocabulary: what sort of thing this is. They are worth keeping short — a list of forty kinds is a list nobody picks from accurately.
Tasks that move themselves
Some tasks wait on the client, and Vylan moves them when the client is done, so they do not sit on "Not started" until somebody notices:
- A document request moves once the client has sent everything it asked for — the required documents, or all of them when none is required.
- Signatures move once every document is signed.
- A questionnaire moves once the client submits it.
It goes to your status with "review" in its name if you have one — "Needs review", say — otherwise to your first in-progress status. Only from "Not started": a task somebody has already started, finished or set aside is left exactly where it is. The job's own status does not change; the client sending paper is not the firm starting the work.
And when your firm approves the last document of a request, the request ticks itself done.
One status, everywhere
A task's status, the colour of its dot and how its due date reads are the same on every screen that shows it. "In progress" is not one colour on the client page and another on the work list.
That sounds like a detail and is not. Two screens quietly disagreeing about what a task's state means is how a firm ends up trusting neither of them.
Whether a task can be assigned to somebody else depends on your firm having more than one person in it — see assigning work.