Customizing Your Order Pipeline Stages

Every Spatiko studio starts with the same five order stages: Planning, Production, Delivery, Completed, and Cancelled. They work for most shoots. If your workflow has steps the defaults don’t show, like a separate editing round, a quality check, or a wait on the agent’s sign-off, you can change the pipeline to match. The stages you set become the columns on your orders board and the options everywhere else an order’s stage appears.

Custom stages are available on Pro and up. Every plan keeps the five default stages. For how an order moves through them day to day, see how orders work.

Opening the stage editor

On the Orders page, click the sliders icon next to the Board / List / Gallery switcher. Its tooltip reads “Edit pipeline stages”. It opens the Pipeline stages dialog.

A few things to know:

• Only people who can edit business settings see the icon. That’s Owners and Admins by default. You can change it per person in roles and permissions.
• Use a computer. The editor lives in the Orders filter bar, and that bar isn’t shown on phone-sized screens.
• The whole studio shares the stages. Renaming, reordering, or archiving a stage changes everyone’s board. Collapsing a board column only affects your own view.
• On plans below Pro, the icon opens an upgrade card instead of the editor.

At the top of the dialog, Your board shows your columns in order. The preview updates as you edit, so you can see a color or position change before you save.

How the pipeline is laid out

The editor splits your stages into three sections. The sections set where a stage can sit on the board.

• Intake: “Where every new booking lands. Always first on the board.” This holds one stage, Planning by default. Every new order starts here, whether it came from an order form, the New order page, or an abandoned cart you turned into an order.
• Work in progress: the stages in between. These are the only stages you can reorder, and they’re where your own stages go.
• Closed: “The two ways an order ends. Always last on the board.” This holds Completed and Cancelled.

Built-in stages and your own stages

Planning, Completed, and Cancelled are built in. They show a lock icon: “Built-in stage. Rename and recolour it freely — it can’t be removed or moved out of its place in the pipeline.” You can call Planning “Booked” or rename Completed to “Done”, but every pipeline always has exactly one intake stage and the two closing stages.

Production and Delivery are ordinary stages. They start out in every pipeline, but you can rename, move, archive, or delete them like any stage you add yourself.

Adding, renaming, and reordering stages

• Add a stage: click Add stage under Work in progress. Type a name of up to 40 characters, then drag the handle to put the stage where it belongs. New stages always go in the Work in progress section.
• Rename a stage: click its name and type. Two active stages can’t have the same name (“Another stage already uses this name.”), and every stage needs a name.
• Change a color: click the colored dot at the start of the row. The colors are Terracotta, Amber, Sage, Teal, Sky, Plum, Slate, Stone, and Rose.
• Reorder stages: drag the handles in the Work in progress section. The keyboard works too: focus a handle, press space to pick the stage up, use the arrow keys to move it, and press space again to drop it.

A pipeline can have up to 12 active stages, counting Intake and Closed. The counter next to Add stage shows how many you’ve used, for example “6 of 12 active”. The cap is the same on every plan. Archived stages don’t count toward it.

Renaming a stage never touches the orders in it. Each stage keeps a permanent internal ID, so a new name only changes the label.

Archiving and deleting stages

Stages you added, plus Production and Delivery, have two more actions at the end of their row.

• Archive: “Archive — hides the column, keeps its orders”. The column disappears from the board and the stage moves to the Archived section at the bottom of the editor. Restore it from there at any time.
• Delete: removes the stage completely. You can only delete a stage with no orders on it, archived orders included. If orders are still on it, the delete button is disabled and says how many. Archive the stage instead, or move those orders to another stage first. A stage you delete shows “will be deleted when you save” with an Undo button until you save.

Automatic moves

At the bottom of the editor, Automatic moves controls whether orders advance on their own: “Orders can advance on their own as work happens. Turn either off and the order stays put.” There are two settings:

• When the first media is added, move to: the first time media arrives on an order still in your intake stage, the order moves to the stage you pick here. That includes photos, video, a floor plan or tour import, or an AI edit, and it also happens when you send the order out for editing. It never moves an order that has already left the intake stage. You can pick any Work in progress stage. By default it’s Production.
• When delivery is sent, move to: when you send a delivery, the order moves to the stage you pick here, from whatever stage it’s in. You can pick any Work in progress stage or Completed. By default it’s Delivery. A delivery never pulls an order back out of Completed, so re-sending a delivery on a finished order leaves it finished.

Choose Don’t move automatically in either setting to turn that move off. A stage you’ve just added shows “save first” in these lists: click Save pipeline once, and you can pick it. The first-media move is recorded in the order’s history and marked as automatic, so you can tell later that nobody moved the order by hand.

If you point the delivery move at Completed, the editor warns: “Sending a delivery closes the order — reports, the client portal and CRM sync count it finished from that moment.” That’s a good fit if your studio treats delivered as done. It’s a poor fit if you still chase payment or revisions after delivery. For those, keep a Delivery stage and move orders to Completed yourself.

If you archive or delete the stage an automatic move points to, that move is switched off.

Saving your changes

Nothing changes until you click Save pipeline. The footer reads “Nothing changes until you save.” until you edit something. If you close the dialog with unsaved edits, it asks “You have unsaved changes to the pipeline. Close and lose them?” with Keep editing and Discard changes. Once you save, you’ll see “Pipeline saved — Every board in the studio now uses these stages.”

If someone else saves the pipeline while you have unsaved edits open, a notice tells you. Click Reload to pick up their version, or save to overwrite it with yours.

Where your stages show up

Once you save, your stages replace the defaults everywhere an order’s stage appears:

• The orders board: one column per active stage, in your order and colors. Cancelled starts collapsed, and you can collapse or expand any column for yourself.
• The status pill on an order: its menu lists your stages, with Cancel order kept separately below them.
• List view bulk actions: select orders and use Move to to move them all to one of your stages.
• The Stage filter on the Orders page.
• Your calendar: shoots take their order’s stage color.
• Analytics: the Active Pipeline chart on the Overview tab counts your open orders, with one bar for each stage that has orders in it, in your names and colors. See reading your analytics dashboard.
• Team notifications: your team’s in-app notifications say which stage an order moved to, using your stage names.

What clients see

Nothing. Stages are internal to your studio. When an order changes stage, the client’s portal timeline shows a plain “Order updated”, and clients get no notification for a stage change. Clients follow their own progress steps (Booked, Scheduled, Shot, Editing, Delivered) in the client portal, and those don’t depend on your stage names.

Go deeper

• How orders work — what each default stage means and how orders move through them day to day.
• Uploading your media — the uploads and imports that trigger the first automatic move.
• Roles and permissions — decide who on your team can change the pipeline.
• Order and scheduling analytics — how much work sits in each stage, and how long jobs take.