Hide or Delete Categories and Statuses - What's the Consequences?

Managing categories and statuses keeps system workflows relevant and clutter-free. However, making changes to these core settings impacts existing records and active workflows. Here is a clear breakdown of why, how, and what happens when you hide or delete categories and statuses.

Why Hide or Delete?

Organizations hide or delete categories and statuses primarily to prevent users from selecting outdated, obsolete, or temporary options when creating or editing records. Restricting these options keeps data consistent and aligns active forms with current operational processes.

What’s the difference?

Action	Description	Reversibility
Hide	Temporarily restricts users from choosing the category or status when creating or updating customers, projects, jobs, forms, or assets. Hidden items remain in system configuration.	Reversible (can be unhidden later)
Delete	Completely removes the category or status configuration from the system settings.	Permanent (cannot be recovered)

What happens to those currently using?

Existing records assigned to a hidden or deleted category or status remains accessible across the system, including customers, projects, jobs, forms, and assets.

When users edit these existing records, the hidden or deleted options will no longer appear in selection menus, preventing them from re-selecting or re-assigning those settings.

Records tied to hidden or deleted options will no longer show up when filtering lists by that specific category or status. However, users can still locate these old forms and records by searching with alternative criteria, such as sequence numbers, creation dates, or direct keywords.

What happens with to-do list set for those hidden/delete?

When a status tied to a to-do lists is hidden, the system bypasses that step and moves directly to the next active status along with its corresponding tasks.

Example: If a workflow normally follows Not Started $\rightarrow$ In Progress → Completed, hiding the In Progress status causes the system to skip In Progress and advance straight from Not Started → Completed, skipping any to-do items linked strictly to the hidden status.

Is there a way to recover deleted setup?

Once a category or status setup is deleted, it is permanently removed. Deleted setups cannot be recovered.