We've learned in this article that you could create custom stages to provide live updates to your contacts or team, or to trigger automations, while managing an online application.
If you want to go further, you can also create custom stages at the checklist step level.
Why would you need to create custom stages ?
The steps you define in your workflows have 'system' statuses to help you better process online submissions and based your applications' activity. See an example below:
Where do custom stages come into play?
With the custom stages feature, you can go even further and customize one of the most critical step stage : the 'Pending review' one.
Instead of sticking to the 'Pending review" stage, you can customize this status to actual internal business milestones that make more sense to you. You'll then go from something similar to the above screenshot to the one below:
This is what your contacts will see :
Creating a custom stage for a step
Let's see how to create custom stage for your checklist steps.
Go to your Resources>Process
Scroll to the related step and click on it
Go to the 'Stages' tab
Add your custom stages
Progressing a step to a custom stages
As you know already, steps can be progressed while managing a live record. So you'll go to an existing client application and progress your step stages to the one that applies.
What is the difference between the stages and the todos?
The steps stages explained in this article allow you to list chronological steps that must occur on your checklist steps. They allow you to understand where you stand in the process for a given step.
E.g; Pending X team review, Audit started
The steps todos (see in this article) are mostly tasks or operating procedures related to a step.
E.g; Approved by John, Reviewed by Mona
Of course, you can use these features like you'd want to, this is just a few tips to help you understand how they usually work.