A submission "Stage" is part of the submission lifecycle from initial submission to it's eventual outcome. Visualising all these submissions in various points along the submission lifecycle in a Kanban board approach can be very useful for users and workflow management.
How do Stages work?
Let's say you receive submissions to be published in your Literary Magazine. You first accept new submissions - this is the first stage of the journey at which point a submission is either accepted or declined. If the submission is declined that may be the end of the lifecycle for that submission however if there is potential, it may need to go to a second reviewer - this might be the second stage of the journey. After that, there may need to be some further review or dialogue with the author themselves, that could be another stage. Finally the piece of work could be published and the author sent a payment - this could be the final stage.
Competitions and Awards are another example of where Stages can be useful. Each Stage could be a "round" of a competition. You may have judging at various stages along the journey to the eventual winner. Visualising all the entries along this competition lifecycle can again be very useful in managing from start to finish.
How to set Stages up
There are some default Stages when creating a Project however you can customise the name, order and the statuses linked to each Stage in the settings following these instructions.