Custom Project Phases

Every project in Kompass moves through a series of phases, from the first enquiry to the final payment. Kompass comes with a standard set of phases, and you can add your own so the phases match how your team actually works. For example, you might add a Design review phase between field work and office work, or a Client sign-off phase before delivery.

How phases are organised

Phases are grouped into four stages, always in this order: Lead, Quote, Progress and Billing. Each stage ends with a gate: a milestone that Kompass relies on, for example to know when a project has been accepted or delivered.

The standard phases are:

Your organisation may have renamed some of these, so the names you see can differ.

• Gates are fixed. They always sit at the end of their stage and cannot be moved or removed.
• Custom phases sit inside a stage, before that stage's gate. A custom phase is never a gate itself.
• Phases are shared across your organisations, but each organisation chooses its own. A phase you create can be used by any organisation (office) in your Kompass, but it only appears in an organisation's projects once it has been added to that organisation's phases. Each organisation also has its own order.

Who can change phases

Changing an organisation's phases needs permission to change the project configuration, which is usually held by Kompass administrators. Creating a new phase or renaming one needs permission to add or change phases. Users who can view the project configuration, but not change it, see the phases read-only.

Editing phases

1. Open your user menu and choose Configuration, then Phases.
2. If you have more than one organisation, choose the organisation whose phases you want to change.
3. Make your changes. Phases are listed by stage, and gates are marked Gate.
   • Add a phase: click Add phase in the stage you want. Pick one of the existing phases, or choose Create new phase and give it a name. A new phase is added at the end of its stage, just before the gate.
   • Change the order: use the up and down arrows to move a phase within its stage. Phases cannot be moved past a gate or into another stage.
   • Remove a phase: use the remove button on the phase. This only removes it from this organisation; the phase itself is kept.
   • Rename a phase: use the rename button on the phase.
4. Click Save. Until you save, nothing changes for your projects, and Cancel puts everything back as it was.

If you use the classic design

The Phases page is part of the new design. On the classic design, administrators can make the same changes in Kompass Admin:

1. To create a phase, go to Projects > Phase definitions, click Add, and enter its name and stage.
2. To add it to an organisation, go to Projects > Configurations, open the organisation, and add a row to its phases with the phase and an order number. The standard phases are numbered in steps of 100 (100, 200, 300 and so on), so to place a phase between two others, give it a number between theirs. For example, use 550 to place it between 500 and 600.

Kompass Admin checks the same rules as the Phases page.

The rules Kompass enforces

When you save, Kompass checks the phases and explains what to fix if something is not allowed:

• Stages stay in order. All Lead phases come first, then Quote, then Progress, then Billing.
• Nothing comes after a gate within its stage. A stage's gate is always its last phase.
• All four gates stay. Requested, Accepted, Completed and Closed cannot be removed.
• A phase that projects have already completed cannot be removed from that organisation. This keeps project history intact.
• Zoho CRM. If the organisation syncs projects with Zoho CRM, map the new phase to a Zoho stage in the Zoho configuration first, then add it to the organisation's phases.

Phases are never deleted, only removed from an organisation's phases, so a phase can always be added back later.

Using custom phases on projects

• A custom phase works like any standard phase on the project: you record its completion date, who completed it, and notes, in the same place as the other phases. Completion dates still have to follow the order of the phases.
• Once a project has completed a custom phase and nothing later, the project's phase shows the custom phase's name in project lists, on the project page and on the map.
• The project status in the list stays meaningful: a project whose latest phase is a custom one shows the same status as the standard phase before it.
• The phase date filters on the project list cover the standard phases only.

Email notifications

To send an email when a phase is completed, including a custom phase, create an email template with the trigger Phase completed:

• Choose a phase on the template to send only when that phase is completed.
• Leave the phase empty to send whenever any phase is completed.

To address the email to whoever completed a phase, use the recipient [email protected], replacing CODE with the phase's code. Kompass creates the code from the name when the phase is created, and it never changes, even if the phase is renamed later. For example, a phase created as Design review has the code design-review, so the recipient is [email protected]. You can see each phase's code in Kompass Admin under Projects > Phase definitions.