Hi pdvsa,
Based on your comment "I will not be able to use that suggestion becasue there are so many to include to cover all. I have over 20 status I need to group on." I don't understand why you are now pursuing the approach given by capricorn1, which is essentially the same (using instr instead of LIKE - same outcome).
If you are multiple grouping statuses like "tendering", "wip", "on hold" etc, you can either have a series of iif statements (20 deep) or create a table to join to as proposed above.
Regards