Plan statuses, and what your client sees
The four statuses a plan on a client record can have, what each one shows the client, how an auto-resume date works, and why duplicating a plan is the safe way to rework one somebody is already following.
A plan sitting on a client record has a status, and the status decides what your client sees in their app. That is the only reason to change one, and it is why Protocol asks you to pick from a list rather than giving you an on and off switch.
You will find the control on the client’s Overview, on the Plans card. Hover a plan row and a small row of actions appears: Status, Dates, Download PDF, Duplicate, Delete. On a narrow screen they are always visible. Pick Status.
The four statuses
Pending is the working state. Build a plan, rearrange a block, leave it half-finished over a weekend: nobody is watching. Move it to Active when it is ready.
Active is what the client follows. Only one plan should normally be active at a time, or your client opens the app and sees two competing programmes.
Paused keeps the plan on their list but closes the content. Use it for a holiday, an injury, or a gap between packages, where you want the client to know the plan is still theirs.
Expired closes a plan out. It leaves the client’s list and appears under Past programs on the History tab, where you can still open and read it.
One exception on Pending
A plan that is linked to a purchase behaves slightly differently: while that purchase is live, the client can see the plan from Pending onwards. A plan with no purchase attached is genuinely hidden while Pending.
If you are building quietly on a client who has paid, work on a duplicate rather than on the plan itself. A duplicate carries no purchase link, so it is hidden in the way you expect.
Pausing with an auto-resume date
Pick Paused and one more field appears: Auto-resume on. It is optional.
Leave it blank and the plan stays paused until you change it back by hand. Set a date and Protocol turns the plan Active again on that date, and shifts its start and end dates forward by the number of days it was paused, so a client who took three weeks off gets those three weeks back at the end rather than losing them out of the middle.
Auto-resume applies to plans that are not linked to a purchase. A purchase-linked plan follows the purchase instead: pause and resume the purchase, and the plan follows.
Plans that expire on their own
You do not have to close out every plan by hand. An Active plan with an end date, not linked to a purchase, becomes Expired on its own about a week after that date passes. The week of slack is deliberate: coaches routinely run a block a few days over.
Plans linked to a purchase are left alone, because the purchase is what decides when they end.
Reworking a plan somebody is following
The safe way to make a risky change to a live plan is not to make it on the live plan.
Duplicate it. The copy is a real, complete, server-side copy, with its own workouts and meal plans, and nothing in it is shared with the original: rewrite a session in the copy and the plan your client is following does not change. Three things about the copy matter here:
- it starts Pending, so the client sees nothing,
- it carries no purchase link, so it stays hidden while you work,
- it carries no link to the library template the original came from, so editing it cannot reach back into your Vault.
Edit the copy over as long as you need. When it is ready, set it to Active and set the original to Expired, or your client sees both at once. If it went wrong, delete the copy and nothing happened.
A long plan takes a moment to copy, because every week of it is being copied. See Duplicating a plan for the full behaviour, including duplicating from your library rather than from a client.
Deleting a plan
Delete on a plan row removes that plan and its weeks from this client only. The template it was built from stays in your Vault, untouched, and every other client on that template is unaffected.
The dialog says so, and it is worth reading once: deleting here is a client-level act, not a library one. To remove the template itself, go to the Vault.
Deleting cannot be undone. If a client simply finished the plan, set it to Expired instead and keep the history.