In brief: A Job moves through Pending, Active, Completed, and Archived; only Archived stops billing, and nothing ever returns to Pending.

Applies to: Everyone in the workspace, though changing a Job's status needs a role that can edit Jobs.

See also: Activating a Job: What Happens When the Plan Locks covers the one transition you cannot undo, and Net Net Pricing: Free Tier, 60-Day Trial, and Paid Plans covers what Active and Completed Jobs cost.

A Job's lifecycle runs through four statuses, and each one turns something on or off. Pending is your planning sandbox, with no time logging and no billing. Active opens time logging, execution, and Performance, and it starts billing. Completed freezes the timeline but keeps billing running and still takes cleanup time. Archived is the read-only off switch that stops billing, and you can bring a Job back whenever you need to.

You'll find the status on Jobs → your Job → Settings, and on the Job card in your Jobs list.

Pending

The Job exists. Nobody is working on it yet.

What you can do: everything to do with the plan. Add, edit, and reorder Deliverables. Set and change effort budgets by service type. Adjust dates. Change the Job type, the client, the Job Lead, the team. Nothing is committed, so change your mind as often as you like.

What is switched off:

• No time logging. Not in the app, not through the API. Time entries against a Pending Job's tasks are blocked at both levels.
• No billing. A Pending Job costs nothing.
• No execution surfaces. The Tasks, Timeline, and Performance tabs are visible but disabled. Typing the URL directly sends you back to Plan.
• Deliverable status is not meaningful yet. There is nothing in progress to be in progress.

Pending is genuinely free. You can plan a whole quarter of prospective work and pay nothing until you switch a Job on.

Active

The Job is live. This is the state most of your real work sits in.

What activation turns on:

• Time logging, subject to task-level eligibility
• The Tasks, Timeline, and Performance tabs
• Performance reporting. The Job now appears in Time, Team, and Jobs reports, and in My Performance
• Billing. From this day forward the Job counts toward your monthly usage

What activation locks: the plan itself. The Deliverable and service type effort pools cannot be edited directly any more, in the app or through the API. That lock is deliberate and it is covered fully in Activating a Job: What Happens When the Plan Locks.

What stays editable on an Active Job: the Job Name, the Job Number, the Job Lead, the team roster, and the dates. None of those are part of the plan, so none of them need a Change Order.

Completed

Delivery is finished. Cleanup is not.

What Completed does:

• The timeline stops advancing. No more schedule drift accrues.
• The plan stays viewable as the historical baseline.
• Time logging is still allowed against eligible tasks, so you can reconcile missed entries and correct mistakes.
• The Performance snapshot is preserved on the Job Performance tab.
• A completion date is recorded at the moment you mark it Completed, for both Projects and Retainers.

What Completed does not do: it does not stop billing. A Completed Job is finished work sitting in your live workspace, still open to look at, still feeding your reports, and it keeps counting toward your bill until you archive it.

Completed means "we are done delivering, but we can still tidy up." It is not a seal.

It is also the natural moment to look back at how the Job actually went, and the top five post-project debrief metrics is a useful starting list for that conversation.

Which tasks can still take time on a Completed Job

Job status and task status are two separate checks, and both have to pass. A Completed Job does not make every task inside it eligible. The full set of rules is in Which Tasks Can Accept Time (and Which Cannot).

• In Progress tasks can use the Timer or Manual Time
• Completed tasks can accept manual missed time, dated no later than their completion date
• Draft, Backlog, and Archived tasks cannot accept new time

Archived

The Job is closed out.

What Archived does:

• Stops billing. This is the switch. Archiving is what takes a Job off your bill.
• Hides the Job from default views. Your Jobs list shows Pending, Active, and Completed unless you ask to see Archived.
• Makes everything read-only. No new time entries, no edits to the Job Name or Job Number, no changes to the team. Write attempts are rejected at the API too, not just grayed out on screen.
• Keeps every piece of data intact for reporting. Nothing is deleted, which is the same principle described in Why Some Things Can't Be Deleted: Archive, Retire, Move.

Archived is reversible. Reactivate the Job any time and it returns to Active with its history untouched. What happens to the Job's conversation along the way is covered in Chat on Completed, Archived, and Quick Task Work.

An Archived Job also overrides every task inside it. The tasks do not each need to be archived separately, because the Job itself supplies the hard lock on new time.

The Job lifecycle: what can move to what

Net Net allows a specific set of transitions. Anything not on this list is rejected.

Three things fall out of that table worth calling out:

Nothing ever returns to Pending. Not from Active, not from Completed, not from Archived. Pending is a one-time state at the start of a Job's life.

Completed can go back to Active. If work reopens after you called it done, move it back. The completion date is replaced when you complete it again.

Archived reactivates to Active, and only to Active. You cannot move an Archived Job straight to Completed. Reactivate it first, then complete it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the four Job statuses in Net Net?

Pending, Active, Completed, and Archived. Pending is planning only with no time logging and no billing. Active opens execution, time logging, and Performance, and starts billing. Completed freezes the timeline but still accepts cleanup time and still bills. Archived is read-only and stops billing.

Does completing a Job stop the billing?

No. Archiving does. Both Active and Completed Jobs count toward your monthly usage, because a Completed Job is still live in your workspace and still feeding your reports. When the work is genuinely finished, archive it and it stops counting from that day.

Can I log time against a Completed Job?

Yes, against eligible tasks. That is exactly what Completed is for: catching missed entries and correcting the record. In Progress tasks can take Timer or Manual Time, and Completed tasks can take manual missed time dated no later than their completion date. Draft, Backlog, and Archived tasks cannot.

Can I move an Active Job back to Pending?

No, and this one is firm. There is no Active to Pending transition anywhere in Net Net. Activation is the commitment moment. If you need a different plan, duplicate the Job and edit the copy while it is still Pending.

Is archiving a Job permanent?

No. Archived Jobs can be reactivated at any time. Everything is preserved: the plan, the tasks, the logged time, the chat, the performance history. Reactivating returns the Job to Active exactly as it was, and billing picks back up from that point.

What happens to time logging when a Job is Archived?

All new time is blocked, regardless of what the tasks inside say. The Archived Job status overrides every child task, so you do not need to archive tasks individually. Time already logged stays exactly where it is.

Related articles

Before a Job reaches any of these statuses it has to be set up and planned, so Projects vs Retainers: Choosing the Right Job Type and Plan Stepper: How to Build a Job Plan Step by Step are the two to read first. Activating a Job: What Happens When the Plan Locks covers the one transition you cannot undo, and Change Orders: How to Add Scope to a Locked Job Plan is how scope changes after it. If you want to know exactly what Active and Completed Jobs cost you, Net Net Pricing: Free Tier, 60-Day Trial, and Paid Plans has the billing side.

Updated on: 08/04/2026