Create and customize lifecycle stages

The options you see in a contact’s Stage selector — To Contact, Contacted, Client, and so on — aren’t configured inside the Contacts module. They live under System → Stages. That table is shared across the whole account: it holds the stages for Contacts alongside Deals, Work Orders, and any other stage-type field, so you’ll see far more rows than what your Contact selector actually uses.

Editing a stage lets you adjust:

• Color and Emoji, to identify it in the board view and in the Stage filter chip.
• Index, which sets its order inside the selector.
• Set as default, so new contacts start on that stage.
• End flow stage, which marks it as a pipeline close (for example, Client or Lost).
• Percentage, a numeric value that goes with the stage and serves to weight its progress within the flow.
• Suggested fields and Required fields: two field-name lists. The required one lists the fields that must be filled before a record can move into that stage.
• Active, to pull it out of the selector without erasing the history of contacts that already carry it.

Creating and deleting a stage

There are two ways to create a stage, and both open the same Create Stage panel with these same fields: the floating + button in the bottom-right corner of this table, or the New stage button on the board.

Each row’s three-dot menu offers Edit and Delete.

To retire a stage that’s in use, use Active

The table is shared across the whole account, so a stage you see from Contacts may be in use by Deals or Work Orders. Turning its Active switch off pulls it out of the selector and keeps the history of the records that already carry it; Delete removes it from the system for every module.

To restrict who can edit a record based on its stage — not just which fields it requires — see Object pipeline rules.