Set up statuses so your reporting stays honest
This is the single most common way a Worksynk workspace ends up with numbers nobody trusts — and it takes two minutes to avoid.
Five statuses ship by default, and you can rename, recolour, reorder, or archive any of them and add your own under Settings → Statuses. Teams do this early, which is fine. The part that catches people is what sits underneath.
Category is what counts, not the label
Every status belongs to one of four categories: Todo, In Progress, In Review, or Done. The category — not the name you gave it — is what sprint velocity, completion counts, reports, and SLA resolution all key off.
So if you add a status called “Shipped” and leave it in the wrong category, every item sitting in it looks unfinished. Velocity under-reports, the sprint looks behind, and delivery confidence reads work as open that is actually done.
A two-minute audit
Worth doing once, and again whenever someone adds a status:
- List every status in the workspace and write its category next to it.
- Anything that means finished — shipped, delivered, live, closed-won — must be Done.
- Anything waiting on someone else to look at it should be In Review, so review-lag detection actually fires.
- Archive statuses nobody uses rather than leaving them selectable.
Board order follows status order
Board columns follow your status order, so reordering statuses in settings reorders the board for everyone. That is convenient and occasionally surprising — if a teammate says the board “changed overnight”, someone reordered statuses.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Every number the platform shows you is downstream of this. A confidence score is only as trustworthy as the categories behind it, and comparing two teams' reporting only works if both mapped their statuses honestly.
It is unglamorous configuration that decides whether anyone believes the dashboards six months from now.