Triage deadlines with SLA colours
When everything is nominally due soon, priority gets decided by memory and by whoever escalated last. Status meetings exist to manufacture a ranking the data should already provide. What a team needs is one rule for how urgent, applied identically on every screen, that nobody has to interpret.
SpidNums ranks every deadline with one shared SLA rule: green when more than seven days remain, orange at seven days or fewer, red when due or overdue. The same colours appear on the dashboard, in Task Master and across the Reminders feed, so triage is reading a colour rather than holding a meeting — the day starts with red, then orange.
How firms run it, step by step
Open the Needs attention list
The dashboard's Needs attention list is the red-and-orange slice of the whole practice — the day's starting screen, computed from real due dates.
Dashboard & SLA
Clear red first
Red means due today or overdue. Each red item is either worked, or consciously snoozed with a reason — never silently scrolled past.
Reminders
Work orange before it turns
Orange marks seven days or fewer. This is where triage pays: the cost of chasing a missing document is lowest while the file is still orange.
Reminders
Scan the KPI cards for drift
The dashboard's KPI cards show the shape of the load over time — a growing orange band is the early sign that capacity, not diligence, is the problem.
Dashboard & SLA
Keep the feed honest
Snooze, done and dismiss are deliberate actions. Colours only mean anything if finished work leaves the feed the day it finishes.
Reminders
Dashboard & SLA
Reminders
Related use cases
Features used
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Frequently asked questions
What do the SLA colours in SpidNums mean?
Green means more than seven days remain, orange means seven days or fewer, red means due or overdue. It is one shared rule applied everywhere — dashboard, Task Master, Reminders — so a colour reads the same on every screen and to every staff member.
Where do the deadlines behind the colours come from?
From data the firm already maintains: service next-due dates on each client's cadence, personal-tax season every January, GST/HST on each filer's reporting period, year-end financial-statement work one month before each fiscal year-end, and task due dates from Task Master. Nothing is re-keyed into a separate calendar.
How should a team use the colours day to day?
Clear red first, then work orange before it turns. Start from the dashboard's Needs attention list — it is the red and orange slice of the practice. Green needs no meeting, which is the point: the colours replace the status round-up, not the work.
See this workflow with your own client list in it.
A tailored demo walks the exact steps above with your services and deadlines.