🔄 How Job Status Changes Automatically (and How Draft Client Tasks Affect It)

Updated July 2026

Client Hub automatically updates a Job's status as work moves forward, so your Jobs Dashboard always reflects real progress without extra manual steps. This article focuses on exactly when you're prompted before a status change — and how open Client Tasks factor into that — as a companion to ⚙️ Setting Up Custom Job Statuses in Client Hub, which covers the full status setup and group-to-group auto-advance behavior.

Quick recap: when status changes automatically

(See the Custom Job Statuses article for full details on setting these up.)

• Checking a task in a group you haven't started yet moves the job to that group's status right away.
• The job status always reflects the earliest incomplete group — working ahead in a later group won't advance the displayed status past an earlier unfinished one.
• Completing every task in a group auto-advances the job to the next group's status.

The Draft Client Task check

Before the job status advances — whether that's an automatic group-to-group move, or marking the job Completed (either by finishing the last group's tasks or manually changing the status) — Client Hub checks the group for any Client Task still in Draft.

• If one is found, you're prompted to confirm before the status moves forward.
• Only Draft status triggers the prompt. Open, Answered, and Closed all count as "done enough" — the accountant controls whether a Client Task was sent, not whether the client has responded.
• Confirming moves the status forward anyway, leaving the Draft task as-is. Declining lets you publish it first — see ✏️ How to Move Client Tasks in a Job Out of Draft.
• This applies both to auto-advancing a group and to completing the job, whether that's the automatic path or manually changing the status to Completed.

💡 Why this matters: Before this check existed, a job could be marked Completed while a Client Task was still sitting in Draft — meaning it was never actually sent to the client. This most often happened with a final Client Task (e.g., asking the client to schedule a review meeting) that got missed once the Firm User confirmed completion.

Quick reference

Have questions about a specific Job's status behavior? Reach out to support and we'll help take a look.