How to set workflow categories#

Audience: admin — reshaping a board's statuses is a settings-owner change; staff experience the result as labels only.

In many ticketing tools, renaming a board column from "Waiting on Vendor" to "Parts Ordered" breaks every SLA rule, report filter, and billing script that looked for the old text. Marula prevents that by tying every board column to one of four fixed workflow categories underneath. You can name your columns whatever makes sense to your technicians, and the underlying category keeps your SLA clocks and reports working reliably.

Prerequisites#

• Admin access to Settings (under Delivery: Boards, Workflow, Taxonomy, and Tags).

The four workflow categories#

Settings → Workflow opens with the core rule:

"Behavior binds to a status's semantic category, never its label."

Every status column on a board maps to one of four categories:

• Open: New or triaged work waiting to be picked up.
• In progress: Active work where billable hours happen and the SLA clock ticks.
• Waiting: Waiting on a customer reply or third-party part; SLA clocks pause automatically.
• Closed: Completed work; SLA clocks and billing stop.

1. Create or organize your boards#

Open Settings → Boards to create ticket boards (for example, Service Desk, Field Service, or Internal IT), assign team members, and attach default checklist templates.

Board membership and checklists live on Boards, while status columns, allowed transitions, and custom fields live on Workflow.

2. Customize status columns per board#

Open Settings → Workflow and pick the board you want to edit:

1. Rename any existing status label freely, reorder columns with the arrow buttons, or add a new status column.
2. Choose the matching semantic category (Open, In progress, Waiting, or Closed) from the dropdown on each row.
3. Mark which status is the default entry column for new tickets.

Because behavior follows the category:

• Renaming "In Progress" to "Bench Repair" changes only the display label.
• Changing a column's category from In progress to Waiting tells Marula to pause SLA timers whenever a ticket sits in that column.

3. Manage ticket types and the category tree#

Open Settings → Taxonomy to manage your high-level ticket types (Incident, Service Request, Problem, Change) and your nested issue category/subcategory tree (such as Network → Wi-Fi or Hardware → Printer).

You can rename, move, or retire taxonomy nodes at any time without affecting SLA timers, billing rules, or workflow transitions. Retiring a node hides it from new ticket dropdowns while keeping historical tickets intact.

4. Manage organization-wide tags#

Open Settings → Tags to create color-coded labels that can be applied across any board. The table shows how many tickets carry each tag so you can clean up unused tags easily. When staff filter the ticket list by multiple tags, Marula matches tickets carrying every selected tag (AND filtering).

What you learned#

• You can rename board columns and issue categories to match how your team talks without breaking SLA timers, automations, or reports.
• Moving a ticket from one board to another automatically maps its status through the four core categories and logs the move in the audit trail.
• For adding custom data fields to boards or clients, see How to customize without code.