Choosing the Right Ticket Status Colors in HaloPSA

Have you implemented unique colors for your Ticket Statuses in HaloPSA?  

Coloring these Statuses adds a great Quality of Life to your Agents working tickets. Often, it is treated as a nice-to-have or “let’s just make it look pretty,” which are fine if it works for you. However, we invite you to imagine instead with us: what if you could leverage symbolic colors that guide an Agent through your defined ticket process. What if you could implement that in a reasonable way?

So, to help lessen that decision fatigue for you since we know you’re busy customizing every other setting in HaloPSA as well, here is the framework that Rising Tide uses to approach customizing these settings to help you quickly and sensibly label your Ticket Statuses. In a future article, we’ll tackle Ticket Action color codes; however, the concepts will generally remain the same.  

Laying out the Ticket Status Colors Framework

Before we jump into coloring statuses, let’s start by defining a ticket’s lifecycle according to how your Agents need to allocate their attention to those tickets, whether that is dictated by standard professionalism or ensuring SLAs are kept. For the sake of this conversation, we are going to address these ticket attention phases with the segments: Normal Attention, Elevated Attention, or Inert Attention.

Normal Attention

Ideally, your Agents receive a ticket and all things are “Go,” they have everything they need to start working, and then Close the ticket when they've successfully completed the task and can rest on their laurels (or move on to the next ticket!).

We recommend all Normal Attention tickets to be assigned “cool colors” like greens, blues, and purples. (And not cool because we think they’re rad, cool as opposed to warm colors, more information here on color theory) Statuses like New and In Progress generally belong here. We have the ticket, everything is going as planned. What a perfect, serene world. Peaceful, isn’t it?  

Unfortunately, that’s not the reality in most of our businesses! What happens when tickets require extra attention or action to ensure their timely completion?

Elevated Attention

‍Here in Elevated Attention is where we see statuses like Escalated, Pending Approval, or Reopened: tickets that we need to be actively thinking about and revisiting, especially ones that are keeping our SLA clock running. To inspire action and increase visibility, we’re using warm, fiery colors like Orange, Red, and Yellow.

What if there is a ticket where we cannot take immediate action, or it doesn’t warrant it? That’s our last category: Inert Attention.  

Inert Attention

‍There will be times when our tickets are active but there is literally nothing we can do but wait. The SLA clock isn’t running, so we don’t need to worry about taking action on these just yet: statuses like Waiting on Client or Waiting on Vendor. We recommend using greys to signify these statuses’ inactive character.  

In general, we recommend you set up HaloPSA to do most of the status setting and remembering to move tasks in and out of statuses, especially Inert-type statuses. Specifically, when setting up these Inert Attention statuses in HaloPSA, be sure to build those Ticket Statuses, Ticket Type Settings, and your related Workflows so when a ticket enters or exits an Inert status, it automatically puts the ticket on or removes it from SLA hold. You can see examples of these settings in the screen captures below.

Some examples of this recommendation in action could be:

• Setting a Waiting on Client ticket to Attention Required when a customer replies to an email
• Setting a Waiting on Vendor ticket to Attention Required when a Supplier updates
• Setting a ticket to Scheduled upon creating an Appointment (Ticket Type Settings: Status after user appointment booking (resource booking), or Status after Agent creates appointment)
• Automatically setting Waiting on Client tickets to Closed after a certain number of hours with no reply according to SLA rules you set.

Ticket Status Colors Framework in Action

With all of these ideas in mind, we suggest as you approach customizing each ticket status, you ask:  

What type of Attention do I expect of my team at this status: Normal, Elevated, or Inert?

When you have that answer, choose a color from the suggested family. Remember that color for other statuses you may have for other Ticket Types so it stays consistent regardless of what Area your Agent is operating from!

Here are some examples for what we specifically recommend to Rising Tide Customers. You will likely not need all of them, depending on your MSP’s needs:  

Normal Attention

• Brand New/Assigned (Waiting on You): Green — Ticket is newly created and waiting for initial action. Green indicates readiness to start and clear action needed.

• Claimed/Work in Progress: Blue — Ticket is actively being addressed towards resolution. Blue symbolizes confidence in ongoing work and progress.  
  • We’d be remiss if we didn’t specifically call out that at Rising Tide we recommend that your Agents should not be "Claiming" tickets until they're ready to work on them.  

• Closed: Black — The ticket has been fully resolved and all necessary actions are completed. Black signifies completion and closure of the ticket.

‍Elevated Attention

• Pending Approval: Yellow — Awaiting authorization or approval to proceed. Yellow is high-visibility and unique to call attention to follow up that may be necessary.  

• Escalated: Orange — Moved to a higher level of support due to complexity or urgency. Orange highlights urgency and attention required.

• Customer Updated/Vendor Updated/Approver Updated: Orange— Orange is used to indicate recent release from a paused status like Waiting on Customer or Waiting on Vendor and subsequent re-instating of the current SLA timer, if applicable.  

• Attention Required: Orange — Elevated attention needed following removal from an SLA hold.  

• Reopened: Red — Previously closed/resolved ticket is active again due to additional issues or dissatisfaction. Red indicates a critical reactivation that needs immediate reassessment.

Inert Attention

• Waiting on Client: Grey — Progress on the ticket is paused because it requires input or action from the client. Grey suggests inactivity from the MSP’s side, waiting on external action.  

• Waiting on Vendor/Waiting on Parts: Grey — Progress on the ticket is halted while waiting for action or information from an external vendor. Similar to waiting on client but specific to external vendors.

• Scheduled: Purple — Scheduled could also technically be included in the Normal category, hence the cool purple. Denotes a paused status where work is planned, but no active work is required.  

• Resolved: Teal — Similar to Scheduled, Resolved straddles the Normal category as well. The issue within the ticket has been addressed, awaiting final closure or verification from the requester. Teal is a calm yet upbeat color indicating resolution but awaiting final closure.

As with most rules, there are going to be times when items cross between phases, or you may operate differently and not define a ticket status the same way we did here.

Maybe you have some color-blind technicians on staff and decide to use completely different colors completely or none at all. (If you do want to create a color-blind friendly palette, here’s a great resource.)  

Maybe you want to choose different values (light or dark) within a certain family than what Halo provides.

Good! Break our rules. They're just here to help you decide what you do or don't actually want.

Our main recommendation is that you use your best judgement on what is right for your team and just be consistent which sometimes means keeping it simple. And let us know what you ended up doing, you may help someone else. Happy customizing!