Status — what your team says about the work.
Decision — whether the condition has been formally ruled on, and so whether it is closed.
Approval status — where the documents attached to it sit in your internal approval process.
Three independent readings. They can disagree, and most of the time they should.
The three, side by side
| Status | Decision | Approval status | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The question it answers | Where has the team got to on this? | Has anyone ruled on it, and is it closed? | Have the documents cleared internal review? |
| Who sets it | A person on the project, by hand. | A person on the project, by logging a decision. Nothing else moves it. | Nobody sets it directly — it is calculated from the condition's documents. |
| Values you'll see | Pending In Progress Submitted Changes Required Complete These are the defaults. Your project may have different ones. | Pending Satisfied Not Required Not Satisfied Fixed — the same on every project. | No approval process Awaiting upload In review Rejected Approved 3 / 3 Often names the step or the person it is waiting on. |
| Can you rename the values? | Yes. Actions → Manage statuses on the Conditions & Checklist page. | No. | No. |
| Where you see it | The Status column. | The Decision column, and the Decisions tab inside a condition. | A pill on the row, and per-document inside the condition. |
| Can it be hidden? | No. | No. | Yes — Project settings → Display → “Show approval status”. |
| What it does not tell you | Whether any evidence has actually been uploaded. | Whether the documents behind the ruling passed internal review. | Whether the condition itself is closed. |
“Pending” appears in two columns and means two different things. A Status of Pending means nobody on your team has moved the work along yet. A Decision of Pending means no ruling has been logged — which is true even when the work is finished and the documents are approved. Read the column heading, not just the word.
Which one should I look at?
- “What should my team pick up next?” → Status. It is the only one your team drives directly, so it is the only one that reflects intent rather than evidence.
- “Is this condition closed?” → Decision. A condition counts as resolved only when it has been ruled Satisfied or Not Required. Everything else is still open, whatever the other two columns say.
- “Is this document signed off internally?” → the approval pill. It is the only one of the three that looks at the documents themselves.
A worked example
A condition reads Complete in Status, Pending in Decision, and Approved 2 / 2 on its pill. That combination is normal and it tells a precise story:
| 1 | The subcontractor uploaded both documents, and the team marked the item Complete — their work on it is done. |
| 2 | Both documents went through the internal approval process and were approved, so the pill reads Approved 2 / 2. |
| 3 | Nobody has logged a decision yet, so Decision is still Pending — and the condition is therefore still open. It will keep appearing in open-item counts, progress bars and reminders until someone rules on it. |
The fix is not to change the Status. It is to open the condition, go to the Decisions tab, and log the ruling.
This is the single most common source of “our progress bar is wrong” questions. Progress counts resolved conditions — the ones with a Satisfied or Not Required decision. A project where everything is marked Complete but nothing has been ruled on will show very little progress, correctly.
Why not merge them into one?
Because different people own them, at different moments, for different reasons. The team's own read on the work moves fastest and is the most informal. Internal approval is a controlled process with named approvers and a clear pass or fail. A decision is a deliberate, recorded ruling that closes the condition — and it stays on the record. Collapsing them would mean losing the ability to say “the work is done, the documents are approved, but nobody has signed it off yet”, which is exactly the state most conditions sit in just before handover.