The Traffic-Light Status System
Every filing deadline in Prompt is colour-coded by urgency. At a glance, you can see the state of every client across your entire practice — what's overdue, what needs attention soon, and what's comfortably on track. This article explains each colour, the exact thresholds that trigger status changes, and how to use the system to prioritise your workload.
The six status levels
The deadline has passed and the filing has not been marked as complete. This is the highest urgency level. Overdue filings should be addressed immediately — late penalties from HMRC and Companies House begin accruing from the day after the deadline.
Prompt continues sending reminder emails after the deadline until the filing is marked complete or the client is paused.
The deadline is within 7 days and the filing is still outstanding. At this stage, even if the client uploads documents today, there may not be enough time to complete the filing before the deadline. Critical filings warrant direct contact — a phone call rather than an email.
The deadline is within the next four weeks. There's still time to act, but not time to be complacent. Approaching filings should be on your radar — if a client hasn't responded to reminders yet, this is the point to follow up more actively.
The deadline is more than four weeks away. The automated reminder sequence will handle this client. No manual action is needed unless you want to get ahead of the deadline.
The filing has been marked as complete. No further reminders will be sent for this period. The filing remains visible in the client's history but is no longer counted in urgency summaries or the workload forecast.
The client or filing has been paused. All automated reminders are on hold. The deadline is still tracked and visible, but no emails will be sent until the client is resumed. This status also applies to inactive clients who have been deactivated without being deleted.
Where statuses appear
The traffic-light system is consistent across all parts of the application. The same colour always means the same thing, regardless of where you encounter it.
Dashboard — urgency summary
The top of the dashboard shows counts of filings in each urgency band across your entire practice. Clicking a band filters the view to show only clients in that state.
Client table — status column
Each row in the client table shows the most urgent active filing status for that client. A client with one overdue filing and three on-track filings shows as Overdue. You can filter the table by status to surface all clients in a given state at once.
Client detail page — deadline pills
Every active filing on a client's detail page shows its own status pill, giving you a per-filing view of urgency. This is where you can see a client with mixed statuses across different filing types.
Dashboard — upcoming deadlines widget
Each entry in the upcoming deadlines timeline is colour-coded by its current status, so you can see at a glance which upcoming deadlines are already in the approaching or critical bands.
What changes a status
Statuses are recalculated automatically every day when the pipeline runs. They can also change immediately in response to manual actions:
- Time passing — a filing moves from On track → Approaching → Critical → Overdue automatically as the deadline gets closer.
- Marking as complete — immediately changes the status to Complete and stops the reminder sequence.
- Pausing a client — immediately changes all of that client's active filings to Paused. Resuming restores their previous urgency statuses.
- Overriding a deadline — if you set a custom deadline date that is further in the future, the status may drop from Critical back to Approaching or On track. If you set a date in the past, the status becomes Overdue immediately.
- All documents received — when the checklist is fully complete, the reminder sequence stops, but the status remains in its urgency band until you manually mark the filing as complete. This distinction matters: documents received means you have what you need; complete means the filing has been submitted.
Using statuses to prioritise your workload
The most effective way to use the traffic-light system is as a daily triage tool. At the start of each day, open the dashboard and check the urgency summary:
- Any Overdue filings should be your first priority — check whether the client has been in contact and whether a deadline extension is possible.
- Critical filings (7 days or fewer) warrant direct outreach if the client hasn't responded to automated reminders.
- Approaching filings (8–28 days) are handled by the automated sequence — review them to confirm the right templates are assigned and the schedule is running.
- On track filings need no action — they're in the automated reminder flow.
You can also filter the client table by status to generate a focused work list. Filtering to Critical and Overdue at the end of each week gives you a clear picture of which clients need personal attention before the next pipeline run.