Five, and they mean what they say.

Status	Means	Typically
Planning	Agreed in principle. Not started.	Quoted, waiting on a go-ahead.
Active	Being worked on.	The only one that should have time logged against it.
On hold	Paused, and expected to resume.	Waiting on the client, on approval, on a payment.
Completed	The work is finished.	Delivered and accepted.
Cancelled	It is not happening.	Called off, or lost.

On hold versus cancelled

The difference is expectation, and it matters because the two lead to different conversations.

On hold says this will resume. The team stays on it, the budget stays committed, and somebody should be chasing whatever it is waiting for.
Cancelled says it will not. Now the question is what has been done, what is owed for it, and whether anything needs invoicing before it is closed.

A project that has been “on hold” for four months is almost always cancelled. Nobody wants to be the one to say so, and so it sits in the list making the pipeline look healthier than it is. Reviewing on-hold projects monthly is a five-minute job that prevents a misleading year.

Completed is not the same as invoiced

Marking a project completed says the work is done. It does not raise an invoice and it does not settle anything.

Before you complete one, check the two things that are easy to leave behind:

Is there unbilled billable time on it?
Is there a milestone with an amount that was never invoiced?

Both are money you have earned. Both are far harder to raise three months later when the client has closed their own books on it.

Cancelling cleanly

Invoice whatever is genuinely owed for work already done.
Mark the remaining tasks as they actually are — do not tick them done.
Write why in the notes. In a year that is the only record of what happened.
Then set it to cancelled.

Where each status shows up

Status	In the list	In reporting
Planning	Visible. No time should be on it.	Not yet committed work.
Active	The working list.	Your live delivery load.
On hold	Visible, and easy to forget.	Still counted as committed — which is why stale ones distort the picture.
Completed	Out of the way.	Delivered.
Cancelled	Out of the way.	Not delivered, and worth knowing how often.

The monthly five minutes

Filter to on hold. For each one, ask what it is waiting for and who is chasing it.
Anything waiting on nothing identifiable is cancelled — mark it and move on.
Filter to active and check none of them has a milestone in the past.
Filter to planning and check none has quietly started without anybody moving it.

The fourth catches a common and expensive one: work begins, time is logged against a project still marked planning, and it never appears in anybody’s view of what the team is doing.

Where to go next

Next in projects Due dates, and the colours that go with them → Create a project →

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