Every client in Cradled sits in one of five pipeline stages. The stage drives what you see on your kanban board, which action badges appear, and how clients are sorted.
The stages
Inquiry
A prospective client you're talking to but haven't formally engaged. Usually a managed client you've added manually after a discovery call or email. Ideal for tracking leads through your sales process.
Prenatal
An active client who is pregnant but not yet close to their due date. This is where most of your client relationship happens — contracts, intake forms, birth plans, prenatal visits.
Due soon
A client within four weeks of their due date. Cradled automatically moves connected clients into this stage as their due date approaches. This is a cue to surface any last-minute prep — final prenatal visit, birth plan check, on-call expectations.
Postpartum
A client who has had their baby. You'll see postpartum check-ins, feeding data, and the postpartum plan. They stay here until you graduate them.
Graduated
A client you've formally wrapped with. Their data is still available for your records, reports, and analytics, but they're tucked out of your day-to-day view.
How stages get set
- Connected clients move between stages automatically based on their due date and birth date. When they report a birth, they move to postpartum. When they hit ~12 weeks postpartum, you can graduate them.
- Managed clients are in whatever stage you put them in. You can move them manually at any time.
- You can always override a stage manually on the client's detail page.
Why stages matter
Your kanban view at /app/clients is organized by stage. Action badges ("Invoice overdue", "Contract pending", "Unread note") are also scoped by stage — so a pending contract on an inquiry is flagged more aggressively than the same contract on a graduated client.
Reports and analytics respect stages too. Practice summary stats are split by prenatal vs. postpartum counts, which helps you understand your caseload mix.