Ticket types & statuses

Ticket types & statuses

These two together form the backbone of the ticket data model. Get them right and reporting + automation become straightforward; get them wrong and you’ll fight them for years.

Ticket types

A type answers “what kind of work is this?”. The seeded set follows ITIL:

• Incident — something broke; restoring a service
• Request — someone wants something; not a fix
• Change — planned work; usually escalated to a change record
• Problem — investigation of recurring incidents

Types drive defaults — the SLA, the form template, the assignee group can all vary by type.

You can add custom types but think hard before doing so. Five types should cover any school. “VIP request” is not a new type, it’s a tag.

Ticket statuses

A status is a state in the ticket’s lifecycle. Seeded statuses:

Status	Open?	Closed?	Pauses SLA?	Meaning
Open	✓	—	—	Available to be worked
Pending	✓	—	—	Being worked
Waiting on user	✓	—	✓	Blocked on requester reply
Waiting on third party	✓	—	✓	Blocked on vendor / external
Resolved	—	—	—	Fix applied; window for requester to push back
Closed	—	✓	—	Sealed; reopen via new ticket

Each status has three flags:

• is_open — counts in queue depth charts; assignee can still act
• is_closed — terminal; doesn’t count against open queue
• pauses_sla — clock stops while in this status

The flags are what make the status mean something. A custom “Awaiting parts” status with pauses_sla=true is fine — it tells the SLA engine to stop the clock while you wait for the part.

Adding a custom status

Common reasons:

• “Triaging” — for a triage agent to mark “I’ve seen this, not yet assigned”
• “Awaiting parts” — physical hardware on order
• “With safeguarding” — pastoral pipeline split

Pick the flags carefully. A custom status with the wrong flags either freezes the clock when it shouldn’t or hides tickets from the queue depth chart.

Status order

The order set on the status admin page controls dropdown order in the agent shell. Put the most-used statuses first.

You can’t delete

Standard statuses (Open / Closed / Resolved) can’t be deleted — they’re load-bearing in the engine. You can rename them in your trust’s nomenclature (“Open” → “Active”) but the slug stays.