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A ZARMS card has six statuses, and each status decides who acts next. In ZARMS, the person who needs to act next on a card has the ball: it’s their turn. When you move a card to the next status, the ball passes to the next person. Cards where you have the ball show up on your My board. Cards that aren’t Done also appear on Home. Keep clearing the cards where it’s your turn and passing them on, and work keeps flowing.
Diagram showing that the Creator has the ball in Draft, the Processor in Not started and In progress, the Reviewer in In review, and the Receiver in Done

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Statuses and who has the ball

In the card details, each assignee role has a colored dot on its left. The color matches the status in which that role has the ball. The icon of the person who has the ball right now gets a border in the status color. For how to set the roles (Creator, Processor, Reviewer, Receiver), see Set assignees and dates. For why a card has four roles instead of one assignee, see Why cards have four roles and a ball.
In In review, the Reviewer sets the card to Done if it looks good, or back to In progress if something needs fixing. Moving it back returns the ball to the Processor. If you write what needs fixing in a comment, you can usually settle it in one round.

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Change the status

There are several ways to change the status. Whichever you use, a record of the change is added to the card’s comments.
  • Card details: Choose a status under Status on the left, then press Save changes. You can change from any status to any other status.
  • Home: Press Move to … on one of your cards. It moves one status forward and saves right away.
  • Kanban: Drag the card to another column (Kanban, List, and Timeline).
  • Card menu: In Kanban and List, choose Set to … from the card’s menu.
  • In bulk: Select several cards and update them together (Filter and bulk edit).
When you change a card from In progress to In review in the card details, Hours (actual) is filled in automatically. For details, see Set assignees and dates.

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When a role is empty

When you move a card forward and a role has no assignee, ZARMS handles it like this.
  • The role for the current status is empty: You, the person who made the change, are put in that role. For example, if you move a card from In review to Done with no Reviewer, you become the Reviewer, and a message at the bottom of the screen tells you so.
  • The role that gets the ball next is empty: A dialog asks you to choose someone for that role. Choose a person and press Assign, or press Skip to move on with the role still empty.
Moving a card back to an earlier status or cancelling it doesn’t change the assignees.

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Cancelled: work you decided not to do

When you decide to drop a piece of work, set it to Cancelled, not Done. Cancelled cards don’t count toward the completion rate or the number of overdue cards, so your team’s numbers stay true to reality. The card is not deleted, and you can move it back to another status later. For more about cancelling and how it differs from archiving, see Done, Cancelled, and Archive.

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You can rename the statuses

You can change how a status is displayed, for example renaming “In progress” to “Working on it.” An admin can do this for the whole team in the admin console, and you can do it for each board in board settings. Only the names change. The six stages and the rules for who has the ball stay the same. For why the statuses are fixed, and examples of renaming them, see Why there are exactly six statuses.
Last modified on November 4, 2026