--- title: How to move a record through its stages and set an owner url: https://tideswell.xyz/docs/records/stages-and-owner description: Move a record to its next stage, and say who is accountable for it. --- > Documentation index: fetch https://tideswell.xyz/llms.txt to discover every page before exploring further. # How to move a record through its stages and set an owner Open any record in Tideswell, whether it belongs to a built-in part of the product or to an Object your team defined, and two controls near the top answer the question everyone actually 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 introduces them. **Status** is the stage the record is at. **Owner** is the person or team accountable for it. Both save the moment you set them, and both are written into the record's history with your name against them. This page covers setting each one, and what to do when the stage you want is not offered yet. ## Before you start [#before-you-start] You need Update access on the Object to change either control, as explains. With View alone you still see both, as plain text and a dropdown you cannot operate, which is what View is meant to look like: nothing hidden, nothing editable. Working out which access you are short of is . ## Move a record to its next stage [#move-a-record-to-its-next-stage] Open the record and pick the stage you want from the **Status** dropdown. It saves on the spot, with a "Status updated" confirmation, and there is no separate Save button to press afterwards. The dropdown offers the stages 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 club goes back in its box. Set the stage 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 stage yet? [#why-can-i-not-pick-a-stage-yet] The option tells you itself. A stage that is not available right now carries its reason on the option: either it needs a particular field filled in first, or it can only be entered from a particular earlier stage. Do the thing the option names and it becomes selectable. * **A stage that needs a field.** Fairgreen wants a tracking number recorded before a repair can be Ready for pickup, so the option says as much until the Tracking number field has a value. Fill the field in and save the record, which is covered in , then set the stage. * **A stage that only follows another stage.** Some stages can be entered only from a named earlier one, so the route through the work is deliberate rather than a free-for-all. The option names the stage it expects you to be coming from. * **A stage that moved while you were reading.** If somebody changes the stage rules in another tab while you have the record open, the dropdown puts itself back and tells you why. Reload the record and you will be choosing from the current rules. ## Where does the stage list come from? [#where-does-the-stage-list-come-from] An admin sets it up, per Object, in **Settings › Objects**, along with any field a stage requires and which stages it is allowed to follow. So the words you see are your workspace's own words. If a record has no **Status** control at all, no stages have been set up for that Object yet, and doing so is . If an admin later takes a stage out of the list, records already sitting at it carry on showing it rather than quietly moving somewhere they have never been. That is deliberate: the record keeps telling the truth about where it got to. Pick the closest stage from the current list the next time you touch it. ## Set who is accountable for a record [#set-who-is-accountable-for-a-record] Use the **Owner** row near the top of the record. The control has two boxes, **Owner** for a person and **Team** for a group. Pick either, or both. The **Team** box lists your departments: this control says team where **Settings › Departments** says department. It saves immediately, confirms with "Owner updated", and lands in the record's history. 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. * The picker offers current members of your workspace and its departments. Somebody who has since left keeps their name where it already sits, so an old record stays readable rather than going blank. * Every Object has an Owner row, so the habit reads the same wherever your team works. ## Hand a record over, or leave it unowned [#hand-a-record-over-or-leave-it-unowned] Handing a record over is one edit. Open the **Owner** row, pick the new person or team, and it is theirs from that moment. To take the owner off entirely, clear the row. The record then reads **Unowned**, spelled out in plain words rather than left as an empty space. Use Unowned honestly. A repair with nobody's name on it is a clear prompt to somebody in the morning. The same repair parked on whoever happened to create it looks handled, and quietly is not. Clearing an owner is a normal thing to do when work goes back into a queue. ## Who finds out when you change either? [#who-finds-out-when-you-change-either] Both changes are recorded in the record's activity, showing who made the change, what it was before, what it is now, and when. So the record answers "who moved this" on its own. Telling the person is still your job, and the quickest way is a comment that mentions them. A comment with an @ mention reaches that person's inbox and links straight back to the record, 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. Reading that history back later, including who changed which field and what it said before, is . To get back to the list you came in from, see , and to keep hold of a particular slice of it, see .