The gear icon on the board opens the pipeline's settings, where Stages lists every column. Everything about them is editable after the fact — unlike the record type, stages are meant to change as you learn what your process really looks like.
Click a stage name to rename it. Renaming is safe: the entries stay where they are, and the board simply relabels.
Drag by the handle to reorder. The order here is the left-to-right order on the board, and it's also what the “move to the next stage” shortcut follows — so a stage in the wrong place makes that shortcut do the wrong thing.
The dot next to each name sets its colour, from a fixed palette. Colour carries meaning cheaply: keep the ends of the board distinct — a red “Lost” and a green “Won” are readable at a glance in a way two blues aren't.
New stages are appended at the end; drag them into place. A stage left without a name isn't saved, so an empty row you added by accident does no harm.
There's no delete for stages, only archive — and the confirmation says exactly what that means: records in it stay, but are hidden from the board until you restore the stage.
That's the safe behaviour, and the trap. Entries in an archived stage don't move anywhere and don't reappear elsewhere; they're simply not on the board. If you're retiring a stage that still has entries in it, move them out first, then archive.
Archived stages are listed under Archived with a Restore next to each, so nothing is lost either way.
Automations can be pointed at a specific stage. Archiving that stage doesn't delete the automation — it leaves one watching for something that can no longer happen. When you restructure a board, open its automations afterwards and check they still point somewhere real.
At the bottom of the settings is Delete pipeline. It removes the stages and every entry on the board. The companies and contacts themselves are not affected — they keep their conversations, their data and their place on any other pipeline.
