Limitations on the color coded status codes and why they may not operate as expected under certain conditions.
Color coded status codes are a powerful new feature introduced in Pro 7.0. The status codes will change automatically to give you an idea of an items project status at a glance. Even though the status codes can be customized in a myriad of ways and have many, many options to do so, they are limited to cues that the computer must be able to pick up. Therefore there is a limit, under certain circumstances, to the accuracy of the status system.
For example - say you are charging the client for an insurance fee. You enter the line item for the fee and the item has a price but has no cost, is not being ordered from any vendor, and you are not collecting or requesting a deposit from the client. At this point the status might be set to "specifying," which is correct. Later, you add this item (along with others) to a proposal, you may notice that the status changes to "need to be invoiced" for this item, even though the client may not have even approved the proposal yet. This happens because the computer's cue for deciding if an item is "approved" is the payment of the client deposit?since this item requests no deposit and does not need to be ordered or received, etc., the only option the computer has is to move the status all the way to "needs to be invoiced" in attempt to prevent you from eventually forgetting to bill out the item. In these cases the only solution is to manually set the status after proposal creation and to manually set it after the client approves the proposal. You could also create a brand new manual status code reserved just for "insurance fees" to remind you that those types of items are an exception.
For more information on setting up status codes, see the User's Guide (Manual).