One Nullable Timestamp, Four Account States: Deriving User Status in Laravel

Most of today went into a user-management overhaul in kickoff — my Laravel starter kit. Flyout CRUD panels, bulk actions, permission assignment, and the piece I want to talk about: account status . Active, suspended, unverified, deleted. The interesting part isn't the feature. It's the modelling decision underneath it. Where do those four states actually live ? The trap: a status column The obvious move is a status enum column on users . Set it to suspended when you suspend someone, active when you reinstate, unverified until they verify their email, deleted when they're soft-deleted. It works. Until it doesn't. Now you've got a status column and an email_verified_at column and a deleted_at from soft deletes — and all three encode overlapping truths. Soft-delete a user and forget to flip status ? Now your database says the account is both active and trashed. Verify an email but the status update fails mid-request? Drift. Every place that mutates a user becomes a place that has to remember to keep status in sync. That's not a feature, that's a maintenance tax. The signals already exist. email_verified_at tells you verified-or-not. deleted_at (soft deletes) tells you removed-or-not. The only genuinely new state is suspended — an admin deliberately blocking sign-in. So that's the only thing worth storing. What we actually store: one nullable timestamp Schema :: table ( 'users' , function ( Blueprint $table ) { $table -> timestamp ( 'suspended_at' ) -> nullable () -> after ( 'email_verified_at' ); }); That's the whole migration. Not a boolean is_suspended — a nullable timestamp. Null means not suspended; a value means suspended and tells you when. A boolean throws that second fact away for free; the timestamp keeps it at no extra cost. Same instinct as email_verified_at and deleted_at — Laravel models "did this happen, and when" as a nullable timestamp everywhere, so we follow the grain of the framework. The behaviour on the model stays tiny: public function isSuspended