Glossary

Plain definitions for the words this documentation uses precisely.

Words this documentation uses precisely, in the order a newcomer meets them rather than alphabetically. Where a term has an everyday meaning that is close but not identical, the difference is the point.

#Accounts and people

Platform: The operator of AgencyDash. Provisions agencies, sets the price book, keeps the job queue running. Signs in at a separate address, and never appears inside an agency's team list.
Agency: One tenant: its own subdomain, staff, clients, branding and audit log. Nothing an agency does is visible to another agency.
Client: A business an agency works for. A company, not a person. The people who sign in on a client's behalf are users with a membership at client scope.
Location: A physical place a client operates from. Local rankings are measured from a location and Google reviews are collected per location, so a client with no location can do neither.
User: One login. One person has one, however many agencies and clients they work with.
Membership: One user's access to one agency or one client, carrying one role. A person with three memberships has one password and three separate views.
Scope: Which of the three levels a membership sits at: platform, agency or client. Roles are fixed to a scope.
Role: A named bundle of permissions. Every membership carries exactly one.
Permission: One specific ability, written area.verb. What the product actually checks. See Roles and permissions.
Staff (on a client): The client's own employees recorded as reference data — name, title, bio, no login. Not to be confused with the client's Team, which is the people who sign in.
Contact: Also reference data: who to call. Not a login, and receives no notifications.

#Entitlement

Module: A per-client switch for one capability. Every agency has every module available; which modules a given client gets is the agency's decision, one client at a time.
Enabled: The capability exists for this client. The work happens.
Visible: The client can see it in their portal. Narrower than enabled — hiding a module never stops the work behind it.
Seat: The unit an agency is billed in. One agent seat per member of staff, one client seat per active client. Both the invoice and the ceiling.
Ceiling: A per-client limit on something that costs money — keywords, crawl pages, monitors, AI runs. Set by the platform; excusable for one agency.
Allowance: The remaining budget for a bounded action. When it reaches zero the button is disabled rather than left to fail.

#Statuses

Active: Normal. Paid work runs.
Paused (client): Stops the meter, not the relationship. Paid work stops; the client's portal is untouched and their SLA clocks keep running.
Offboarded (client): The engagement has ended. Paid work stops, SLA deadlines are cleared, the client seat is freed, and the portal goes read-only rather than dark — they keep every page and lose every button.
Trialling (agency): Full access with a recorded trial end date.
Past due (agency): Read-only across the whole tenant, and scheduled paid work stops. Deliberately not a lockout — the person most likely to be able to pay is the one who would be locked out.
Suspended (agency): Sign-in blocked for the agency's staff and its clients. Both see a "temporarily unavailable" page.
Read-only demotion: Collapsing a session to the five permissions that only ever let someone look. What an offboarded client and a past-due agency both get.

#The work

Ticket / Request: One thing a client has asked for. Called a ticket in the agency portal and a request in the client portal — the same record.
Internal note: A comment on a ticket that the client's version of the page never receives. Not hidden — not sent.
SLA: A response-time commitment in hours, set per client. Drives the countdown on a ticket and the dashboard's Needs attention table.
Project: Work bigger than a request. Internal — clients never see projects, boards, tasks or cycles.
Cycle: A time box: a sprint, a month, a campaign period.
Epic: A grouping by theme rather than by time. A task can have one of each.
Workflow state: A column on a project's board. Each project defines its own.
Approval chain: An ordered list of sign-off steps, each with approvers and a mode. Two exist per client: the agency chain (internal review) and the client chain.
Any / All: A chain step's mode. Any clears when one listed approver signs off; all waits for every one of them individually.
Recall: Pulling back an approval, with a reason, for another round.

#Contracts

Template: A reusable starting point. Versioned, and copied rather than referenced — editing a template never reaches back into agreements already in flight.
Fill-in field: An input a template declares. All of them must be filled before a contract can be sent.
Party: Someone on an agreement: a signer, or copy only.
Signing order: Parties later in the order do not receive their link until the earlier ones have signed.
Access code: An optional code, given to a signer through another channel, required before the agreement opens.
The ceremony: Read → consent → identity (an emailed one-time code) → sign. The same four steps for every signer, including the agency's own.
Ledger: A contract's hash-chained event log. Each entry's hash covers the previous one, so an entry cannot be altered without breaking every entry after it.
Seal: The SHA-256 digest of the executed document, a signature over it, the key identifier and the byte count.
Amendment / Termination: New agreements linked to a completed parent, so the chain of what was agreed reads in order.

#Search

Cadence: How often tracked keywords are re-checked: monthly, weekly or daily. The single biggest lever on what a client costs.
Tracked / Untracked: Untracking stops the checks, keeps every measurement already taken, and frees the slot. It is not deletion, and there is no way to destroy a keyword's history.
Alert: A condition, not an occurrence — "this keyword fell off page one", never "on the 4th". One row per condition, so a keyword sitting at #14 does not raise a fresh alert every night.
Map pack: The three local results Google shows above the organic ones.
AI Overview: Google's AI-generated answer, and whether the client is cited in it.
Crawl: A sweep of a whole site, bounded by a page ceiling. Runs in the background.
Page audit: One URL, checked on demand. Cheaper than a crawl.

#Platform machinery

Job: A queued unit of background work. Claimed with a lease, so a container dying leaves it stalled and reclaimable rather than lost.
Impersonation / View-as: A read-only session as somebody else. Always read-only, always bannered, always time-boxed, always audited with a typed reason.
Audit log: Append-only record of every mutation: actor, action, time, address. Nothing in the product can edit or delete an entry.
Sending domain: A domain an agency has verified so notifications come from their address rather than the platform's.
Tenant: One agency and everything filed under it. The unit of isolation.