Create Custom Case Statuses
Custom case statuses are the tenant-defined labels agents use to say what state a piece of work is in — Waiting on legal, In review, Blocked — without touching whether the case is open or closed. This article covers the admin side: adding, ordering, and archiving statuses under Settings → Cases. For the underlying concept, see Case workflows and What are Cases?; for how agents actually use a status day to day, see How to work a case.
Before you start: status vs. lifecycle vs. priority
It’s worth being explicit about this, because it’s the most common point of confusion:
- Lifecycle (open/closed) — Is this case still being worked? — Built-in, not configurable
- Custom status — What state is the work in right now? — You — under Settings → Cases
- Priority — How urgent is it? — Separate field, not covered here
Setting a custom status never closes or reopens a case — it’s an orthogonal label that rides alongside the lifecycle. A case can be open and “Blocked,” open and “In review,” or closed with no status set at all. Don’t reach for a custom status as a substitute for closing a case; use the lifecycle for that.
Add a status
- Go to Settings → Cases.
- Find the custom statuses list and click to add a new one.
- Give it a name — short and specific reads best in the case list (e.g. “Waiting on legal” rather than “Pending”).
- Pick a color. Color is what makes a status scannable at a glance in the case list — agents will learn to recognize a status by its color dot before they read the label.
- Save.
New statuses are appended to the list and are immediately available to agents when setting a status on a case.
Order the list
Each status has a sort position, and the order you set here is the order agents see when picking a status on a case, and the order statuses appear in the case list’s status scope dropdown. Put the statuses your team uses most at the top.
Archive a status you no longer use
Retire a status instead of deleting it outright:
- Open the status in Settings → Cases.
- Archive/deactivate it.
An archived status stops appearing as an option when agents set a status on a case, but it doesn’t rewrite history — cases already carrying that status keep it until someone changes it. Use this when a workflow phase goes away (a status was tied to a process you no longer run) rather than trying to bulk-migrate every case off it first.
How this surfaces for agents
Once you’ve defined statuses, they show up in two places in the case list:
- The status scope dropdown, as a grouped menu:
- Lifecycle — Open cases / Closed cases (the built-in options)
- Status — your custom statuses, each shown with its color dot and a count of cases currently carrying it
- A Manage statuses… link at the bottom, which brings admins straight back to this settings page
- The filter dialog, where a custom status can be combined with other filters.
Agents set a status directly on a case and can then scope or filter the case list by it — see How to work a case for that walkthrough.
Related
- Case workflows — how statuses relate to stages and the broader workflow model
- What are Cases? — the case object and its fields
- How to work a case — setting a status on a case and scoping the list by it, from the agent’s side