Project work is rarely linear. Most teams need more than just active or inactive indicators to understand where things stand. Project statuses and stages work together to enhance communication, visibility, and reporting, and provide a full picture of your project pipeline - from draft to done, from opportunity to invoice. 

Using project statuses and stages, you can replicate your projects’ lifecycle terminology in Float by mapping each step as a stage and assigning each stage to the appropriate status. This gives your team clear insight into where each project stands while maintaining accurate schedule visibility and time tracking.

Project statuses describe your projects’ current states. They control functionality and determine visibility, notification triggers, and the ability to log time. There are five default project statuses: Draft, Tentative, Confirmed, Completed, and Canceled.

Project stages are customizable workflow steps that provide more detailed insight into a project’s progress. Each stage is linked to one of the five main project statuses and inherits its functionality.

The default set of stages and statuses for each new team in Float includes:

📝Note: For existing teams, the previous default project statuses of draft, tentative, and confirmed automatically became stages linked to their matching status.

The Draft status allows teams to test different project configurations, such as team members, dates, or phases, without displaying them on the Schedule. This status is especially helpful when exploring scenarios before confirming a project.
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Draft project visibility is limited: their allocations, phases, and milestones appear only in the Project plan and Project view, shown as dashed outlines.
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Draft projects are not visible to Managers unless they are the Project Owners or the Managers with ‘manage projects’ permission can edit this project setting is enabled for the project.

The Tentative status is best for work that is yet to be confirmed. Tentative projects are visible to all team members with access to view projects. Tentative projects are not included in notifications and do not support time logging. 

Allocations from the tentative projects, their phases, and milestones are displayed as color outlines on the Schedule, Project plan, and Project view, indicating that these items are not yet finalized.

Allocations, phases, and milestones belonging to projects with Confirmed status show on all pages as colored tiles. Notifications and time logging are active.

Once a project is finalized, you can set its status to Completed. This indicates that the work is finished, but you can still make updates (including logging time) without notifying the team. Allocations remain visible to everyone with access to the project. Allocations are displayed with a checkmark, and the colors become translucent.

If you decide not to proceed with a project, you can change its status to Canceled. While you can still make changes to the project, these won’t trigger any notifications. Time logging for canceled projects is disabled. The project’s allocations, phases, and milestones remain visible on the Project plan and Project view, with their names crossed out to show that the work is no longer active. Canceled allocations do not show on the Schedule.

Account Owners and Admins can manage project statuses and stages in Team settings > Projects. This is where you can map the default statuses with custom project stages.

In Team settings > Projects, Account Owners and Admins can map stages to statuses to reflect your team’s projects’ lifecycle and internal terminology.

Every stage must be linked to a status. Stages have the same functionality as the status to which they belong. To add a stage, click on +Add stage and add the name. For each stage, you can add a description that will be visible in the Stage field of the project side panel.

You can create a maximum of 50 stages per team across all statuses, each with a unique name. Stages can be reordered, archived, or deleted.

📝Note: The order of stages set in Team settings > Projects > Project stages determines how they appear in the project side panel.

Archived stages are stored in the Archived tab and can be activated if needed.

You can only delete a stage if it’s archived and not linked to any projects (the project count is zero). To permanently remove a stage, select it from the list and click Delete.

The project’s stages and the corresponding status icons are displayed:
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1) On the Projects page, in the Stages column.

📝Note: To sort your projects by status and the corresponding stages, click on the Stage button in the top row. The stage order is defined in Team settings > Projects > Project stages.

📝Note: If you don’t use certain stages, you can archive them in Team settings > Projects > Project stages. Archived stages don’t appear in the Stage drop-down.

If the new stage is associated with a different project status, the project's visibility, notification settings, and ability to log time may change:

To update the stage of multiple projects at once, use the bulk action menu on the Projects page. Select the projects you want to modify, click Edit, choose Project stage, and then pick the stage to apply.

On the Report page, you can now use the Project status filter to display projects with specific statuses. By default, Draft and Canceled projects are hidden, but you can include them in the filter if needed.