How to set a record's status and owner

Every record of one of your own Objects has two controls near the top of its page that answer the question everyone asks about it: where has this got to, and who has it. An Object is a kind of record your team defines, such as Repairs or Sample requests, and What is an Object? introduces them.

Status is the stage the record has reached. Owner is the person or team accountable for it. Both save the moment you set them, with no Save button to press.

A purchase order has its own pair, Stage and Owner, in its side panel. That is covered in How to move a purchase order through its stages.

Before you start

You need Update on the Object to change either control, set on its row in Settings › Permissions (for example Repairs · Update). With View alone you still see both: the status in a dropdown you cannot change, and the owner's name as plain text. How to work out who can do what in your workspace helps you work out which access you are short of.

Move a record to its next status

Open the record and pick from the Status dropdown. It saves on the spot and confirms with "Status updated". The dropdown offers the statuses set up for that Object, in the order an admin put them in.

At Fairgreen Golf Co. a repair runs Received, then In progress, then Ready for pickup. The person on the desk sets In progress the morning the work starts, and Ready for pickup when the mended jacket goes back in its box.

Set the status as you go rather than at the end of the week. Anyone opening the record then knows what is true right now without walking over to ask.

Why can I not pick a status yet?

The option tells you. A status that is not available right now is greyed out, with its reason after its name. Do what the reason names and the option opens up.

• "needs" a field. Fairgreen wants a tracking number before a repair can be Ready for pickup, so that option reads "needs Tracking number" until the field has a value. Fill the field in and press Save, as How to add and edit a record describes, then set the status.
• "only from" another status. Some statuses can be entered only from a named earlier one, so the route through the work is deliberate. The option names the status you need to be at first, such as "only from "In progress"".
• The rules changed while you were reading. If an admin changes the statuses while you have the record open, the dropdown snaps back and shows why underneath. Reload the record and pick again from the current list.

Where does the status list come from?

An admin sets it up per Object: Settings › Objects, click the Object, then the Statuses tab. That is also where they set any field a status needs and which statuses it can be entered from. So the words you see are your workspace's own.

If a record has no Status control at all, no statuses are set up for that Object yet, and How to set up the stages a record moves through covers adding them.

If an admin later takes a status out of the list, records already at it keep it. Pick the closest status from the current list the next time you work on one of those records.

Settings › Stages is a different page. It holds the stages for purchase orders, outreach, special orders, project items and production orders, not for your own Objects.

Set who is accountable for a record

Use the Owner row near the top of the record. It has two boxes: Owner for a person and Team for one of your departments. Pick either, or both.

The change saves immediately and confirms with "Owner updated". Owner is a deliberate statement of who is accountable now, which is a different thing from who happened to create the record.

• A person and a team together is more useful than most people expect. Fairgreen puts the Customer Care team on every repair and adds whoever is on the desk that week, so the record still has a home when that person is on holiday.
• Both boxes search as you type. Owner lists the current members of your workspace, and Team lists your departments from Settings › Departments.

Hand a record over, or leave it unowned

To hand a record over, pick the new person or team in the Owner row. It is theirs from that moment.

To take the owner off, press the small × inside the box. People who can only view the record then see Unowned in place of a name.

An empty Owner box on a record you can edit means nobody owns it, or its owner has left the workspace. Either way, pick a current member to give it a home. A repair with nobody's name on it is a clear prompt for somebody to pick it up in the morning.

How do you tell someone you handed them a record?

Leave a comment that mentions them. A comment with an @ mention reaches that person's Inbox and opens the record directly, so the handover and the context arrive together.

Fairgreen's desk sets the owner and writes "@Priya this one is yours, the customer is calling Friday" in the same minute. Status moves also show in the record's activity as a line such as "Priya moved this from "received" to "in progress"". Both are covered in How to comment on a record and see its history.

To get back to the list you came from, see How to find and open your records. To keep a particular slice of it, see How to search, filter and save a view.