Glossary

Plain definitions of the terms behind sales, inventory, hiring, compliance, pricing, events and team work, with the formula or a worked example wherever one helps.

Remote Team Collaboration Hub

Async standup — An async standup is a written status update each person posts on their own schedule, gathered into one summary instead of holding a live daily meeting.
Asynchronous communication — Asynchronous communication is any way of working together that does not need everyone present at the same moment: people write, record or post, and others respond when they can.
Blocker — A blocker is anything that stops a piece of work from moving forward that the person doing it cannot resolve alone, such as a missing decision, an access request or a dependency on another team.
Capacity — Team capacity is the number of hours people realistically have for committed project work in a period, once meetings, support duty, holidays and other obligations are taken out.
Follow-the-sun model — The follow-the-sun model passes work from one team to the next as the working day ends in each region, so something is always moving and customers get 24-hour coverage across time zones without anyone working nights.
Handover — A handover is the structured transfer of work and context from one person or shift to the next, so the work carries on without the next person having to rediscover what was already known.
Kanban board — A Kanban board is a visual board of work, with a column for each step of a process and a card for each task that moves from left to right as the work progresses.
Threaded discussion — A threaded discussion keeps replies attached to the message they answer, instead of adding them to the bottom of the channel, so several conversations can run side by side without tangling.
Work-in-progress (WIP) limit — A work-in-progress limit (WIP limit) caps how many tasks a person, team or board column can have in progress at once.

AI Powered Content Repurposing

Abstractive summarisation — Abstractive summarization produces a summary in new words: it paraphrases and condenses the source rather than quoting it, much as a person would sum up an article for a colleague.
Brand voice — Brand voice is the consistent personality a company uses in everything it writes, from the website to support replies: the words it chooses, the words it avoids and the attitude it takes towards readers.
Content repurposing — Content repurposing is turning one piece of content, such as an article, webinar or podcast episode, into several pieces shaped for other channels, rather than posting the same text in several places.
Extractive summarisation — Extractive summarization builds a summary by selecting the most important sentences from the source and using them as written.
Meta description — A meta description is a short summary of a web page, written into its HTML, that search engines may show under the page title in their results.
Pull quote — A pull quote is a short sentence lifted from an article or interview and displayed prominently, larger or set apart, to catch a skimming reader’s eye and draw them into the piece.
Readability grade — A readability grade estimates how hard a piece of text is to read, usually as the school grade or reading age needed to follow it comfortably, worked out from sentence length and word length.
TF-ISF — TF-ISF scores how important a word is to a sentence by combining how often it appears in that sentence with how rare it is across all the sentences of the document.
Tone register — Register is the level of formality in a piece of writing, from formal to casual; tone is the attitude it carries, such as confident, warm or urgent.

Compliance as a Service for SMBs

Business associate agreement (BAA) — A business associate agreement is a contract HIPAA requires between a healthcare organisation and any vendor that creates, receives, stores or transmits protected health information on its behalf.
Cardholder data environment (CDE) — The cardholder data environment is the people, processes and systems that store, process or transmit payment card data, plus anything connected to them.
Control — A security control is a specific safeguard a company puts in place to manage a risk, such as revoking a leaver’s access within 24 hours, and that an auditor can ask you to prove is working.
Data processing agreement (DPA) — A data processing agreement is the contract between a controller and a processor that sets out how the processor may handle personal data on the controller’s behalf, as the GDPR requires.
Evidence — Compliance evidence is the record that proves a control actually operated: a log export, a signed policy, a closed ticket, a dated screenshot.
Protected health information (PHI) — Protected health information is individually identifiable health information held or transmitted by a HIPAA covered entity or its business associate: details about a person’s health, care or payment for care that can be linked to them.
Readiness assessment — A readiness assessment is a rehearsal of an audit: a review of your controls, policies and evidence against a framework such as SOC 2, done before the real audit so gaps can be fixed while it is still cheap.
SOC 2 Type I — SOC 2 Type I is an audit report on whether a company’s security controls are suitably designed and in place on one specific date.
SOC 2 Type II — SOC 2 Type II is an independent audit report, under the AICPA’s SOC 2 framework, on whether a company’s security controls actually operated effectively over a period of time, usually three to twelve months.
Subprocessor — A subprocessor is a third party that a data processor engages to process personal data on behalf of its customer, such as the cloud host or email service a software company uses to deliver its product.
Trust Services Criteria — The Trust Services Criteria are the five categories a SOC 2 report can cover: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy.

Smart Inventory Forecasting

ABC analysis — ABC analysis ranks inventory items by their share of revenue or consumption value: A items are the few that make up about 80% of value, B items the next 15%, and C items the long tail that makes up the rest.
Days of cover — Days of cover is how long the stock you hold, plus what is already on order, will last if demand matches the forecast.
Economic order quantity (EOQ) — The order size that keeps ordering and holding costs as low as possible.
Holding cost — Holding cost is what it costs to keep stock until it sells: the money tied up in it, storage, insurance, handling, and the risk of it being damaged, going out of date or becoming obsolete.
Holdout validation — Holdout validation tests a forecasting method on data it has not seen: you hide the most recent period, fit the model on everything before it, and score the forecast against what actually happened in the hidden period.
Holt double exponential smoothing — Double exponential smoothing, known as Holt’s method, is a forecasting technique that tracks two things over time, the level of demand and its trend, and updates each with its own smoothing weight as new data arrives.
Inventory turnover — Inventory turnover is how many times a business sells and replaces its inventory in a period, usually a year.
Lead time — Lead time is the time between placing an order with a supplier and having the stock available to sell.
MAPE (mean absolute percentage error) — MAPE, the mean absolute percentage error, measures how far forecasts were from actual results on average, as a percentage of the actual values.
Reorder point — The stock level that should trigger your next order, and whether you have reached it.
Safety stock — How much buffer stock to hold for the service level you want, plus the reorder point.
Service level — In inventory, service level is the probability of not running out of an item during one replenishment cycle.
Stockout — A stockout happens when an item a customer wants is not available to sell.

Recruitment Workflow Optimizer

Applicant tracking system (ATS) — An applicant tracking system is software that manages candidates through a company’s hiring process, from application to offer, keeping every applicant, conversation and decision in one place.
Dwell time — Dwell time is how long a candidate waits in one stage of your hiring process before moving on or being turned down, for example the days between a first interview and the decision to invite them back.
Interviewer calibration — Interviewer calibration means comparing how different interviewers score candidates, finding those who are consistently harsher or more generous than the rest, and adjusting so a score means the same thing whoever gave it.
Offer-accept rate — Offer acceptance rate is the share of job offers that candidates accept.
Recruitment funnel — A recruitment funnel is the sequence of stages candidates pass through on the way to a hire, from application to screening, interviews and offer, with fewer people at each stage than the one before.
Scorecard — An interview scorecard is the set of criteria a candidate is assessed on for a role, each with a rating scale, filled in by every interviewer independently before the panel discusses anyone.
Source quality — Source quality measures how good each recruiting channel is at producing hires rather than applications.
Structured interview — A structured interview asks every candidate for a role the same predefined questions, in the same order, and scores the answers against the same criteria and scale.
Time-to-fill — Time to fill is the number of days from when a job is approved or opened to when a candidate accepts the offer.
Time-to-hire — Time to hire is the number of days between a candidate entering your process, usually by applying, and accepting your offer.

Personalized Learning Platform for Corporations

Adaptive learning path — An adaptive learning path is a sequence of training that changes based on what the learner shows they know, so people skip what they can already demonstrate and spend their time on what they cannot.
Competency framework — A competency framework describes the skills, knowledge and behaviours a company expects in each role, with levels that show what good looks like at each stage of a career.
Completion rate — Completion rate is the share of assigned learning that people actually finish.
Coverage — Skill coverage is how many people in a team hold a given skill at the required level.
Learning management system (LMS) — A learning management system is software for creating, assigning, delivering and tracking training: it holds the courses, enrols the learners, and records who completed what and how they scored.
Prerequisite — A prerequisite is a module or skill that must be completed before another one makes sense, such as learning how the pricing model works before learning to negotiate discounts.
Proficiency level — Proficiency levels are defined standards of competence for a skill, typically running from awareness through working and practitioner to expert, each described by what a person can observably do rather than how long they have done it.
Skill gap — A skill gap is the distance between the proficiency a role requires and the proficiency a person has actually demonstrated.
Skill matrix — A skill matrix is a grid of the skills a team needs against the people or roles in it, showing the proficiency each role requires and the level each person has demonstrated.
Time to competency — Time to competency is how long it takes a new hire, or someone moving into a new role, to reach the proficiency the role requires.

Customer Support Sentiment Analyzer

Churn risk — Churn risk is the likelihood that a customer will leave.
Contrast clause — A contrast clause is the part of a sentence after a pivot word such as “but”, “however” or “although”.
Escalation signal — An escalation signal is a marker in a customer conversation that it is about to get worse: a threat to cancel, a mention of a competitor, a manager being copied in, or the third follow-up on the same issue.
Lexicon-based scoring — Lexicon-based sentiment analysis scores text using a dictionary of words with known polarity and strength, adjusted by grammatical context such as negation, intensifiers and contrast.
Negation scope — Negation scope is how far a negating word such as “not”, “never” or “no” reaches in a sentence.
Sentiment analysis — Sentiment analysis classifies text by the attitude it expresses, usually positive, negative or neutral, and ideally by how strongly, so large volumes of reviews, tickets or comments can be read at a glance.
Sentiment score — A sentiment score is a number that summarises how positive or negative a piece of text is.
Topic clustering — Topic clustering groups customer conversations by what they are about, such as billing, login problems or a specific feature, so sentiment and volume can be traced to a cause instead of reported as one average.
Voice of the customer (VoC) — Voice of the customer is the practice of capturing what customers say about their needs, experiences and frustrations, in their own words, and feeding it into product, service and marketing decisions.

Micro SaaS API Marketplace

API key — An API key is a secret string that identifies the application or customer calling an API, so the provider can authenticate the request, apply the right limits and bill the right account.
API monetisation — API monetization is charging for programmatic access to data or functionality, for example per call, per volume of data, or through subscription tiers that include a quota of usage.
Idempotency key — An idempotency key is a unique identifier a client sends with a request so the server can recognise a retry of the same request and return the original result instead of performing the action twice.
Metered billing — Metered billing charges customers for what they actually used during a billing period, such as API calls, messages sent or gigabytes stored, rather than only a fixed subscription fee.
Overage — An overage charge is what a customer pays for usage beyond the quota included in their plan, billed at a per-unit rate, such as a price per thousand API calls above the monthly allowance.
Quota — An API quota is the number of calls included in a plan over a billing period, such as 100,000 requests a month.
Rate limit — A rate limit caps how many requests a client can make to an API in a short window, such as 100 requests a minute, to protect the service from overload and abuse.
Revenue share — A revenue share is an arrangement in which a platform keeps a percentage of the money earned through it and passes the rest to the seller, instead of charging only a fixed fee.
Sandbox — An API sandbox is a test environment where developers can call an API with realistic behaviour but without affecting real data, real money or their production quota.
Scoped key — A scoped API key is a key that is only allowed to do specific things, such as read orders but not issue refunds, so that if it leaks, the damage is limited to what that scope allowed.
Usage-based pricing — Usage-based pricing charges customers according to how much of a product they use, such as calls made, messages sent or data processed, so the bill grows with the value they get.

Virtual Event Management Suite

Drop-off point — A drop-off point is a moment in a session where departures suddenly speed up.
Engagement segment — An engagement segment groups event registrants by how deeply they took part, from no-shows to people who stayed throughout and asked questions, so the follow-up matches what each person actually did.
Registration window — A registration window is the period between the moment sign-ups open and the moment they close.
Retention curve — A retention curve shows how many people were still present at each moment of a session, as a share of the peak audience.
Session capacity — Session capacity is the maximum number of people one session within an event can hold, such as a workshop with forty seats, tracked separately from the capacity of the event as a whole.
Show-up rate — Show-up rate is the share of registered people who actually attend an event or webinar.
Virtual event — A virtual event is an event held online, where people register, attend sessions and interact through a browser or an app instead of travelling to a venue.
Waitlist promotion — Waitlist promotion is offering a freed place at a full event to the next person in the waitlist queue, and holding it for them for a set time before it passes to the person after them.
Watch time — Watch time is the number of minutes someone was actually present in a session, as opposed to whether they joined at all.
Webinar — A webinar is a live online presentation, talk or training session in which one or a few presenters speak to an audience that watches and takes part through chat, questions and polls.

Dynamic Pricing Engine

Cost-plus pricing — Cost-plus pricing sets a price by adding a fixed markup to the cost of a product: work out what it costs to make or buy, add a percentage, and that is the price.
Dynamic pricing — Dynamic pricing is adjusting prices in response to conditions such as demand, inventory levels, competitor prices or time remaining, instead of keeping one fixed price.
Guardrail — A pricing guardrail is a hard limit applied after pricing logic runs, such as a minimum price, a maximum price or a cap on how far a price can move at once, which no rule is allowed to override.
Markdown pricing — Markdown pricing is a permanent price reduction on stock that is not selling fast enough or is nearing the end of its life, such as seasonal goods, perishables or a discontinued line.
Price elasticity of demand — Price elasticity of demand measures how much the quantity sold changes when the price changes: the percentage change in units sold divided by the percentage change in price.
Price floor — In business pricing, a price floor is the lowest price an item is allowed to sell for, usually its cost plus the minimum margin the business needs, enforced as a minimum price rule that automated pricing cannot go below.
Price optimization — Price optimization is choosing the price that best meets a goal, usually maximum revenue or profit, using data on how demand responds to price, along with costs and competition.
Reference price — A reference price is the price a customer expects to pay, anchored by what they paid last time, what they see elsewhere or what the seller shows as a comparison.
Revenue per visitor (RPV) — Revenue per visitor is the total revenue in a period divided by the number of visitors in that period.
Rule stacking — Rule stacking applies pricing adjustments in sequence, each acting on the result of the one before, so the final price can be traced step by step from the base price.
Statistical significance — A result is statistically significant when the difference you observed is larger than random chance would plausibly produce if there were really no difference.

Sales CRM and Pipeline

Commit — Commit is the set of deals a sales rep is willing to stand behind for the period: the ones they expect to close and would be surprised to lose.
First-touch attribution — First-touch attribution gives all the credit for a sale to the first campaign or channel that brought the contact in, such as the article they found or the ad they first clicked.
Last-touch attribution — Last-touch attribution gives all the credit for a sale to the last campaign or channel the contact interacted with before the lead converted or the deal was won.
Lead scoring — Lead scoring ranks contacts by how likely they are to become valuable customers, so sales time goes to the people most worth calling first.
Lifecycle stage — A lifecycle stage records where a contact sits on the path from first contact to customer, for example subscriber, lead, qualified lead, opportunity or customer.
Linear attribution — Linear attribution splits the credit for a sale equally across every recorded touch that led to it.
Sales cycle length — Sales cycle length is the time it takes to close a deal, usually measured in days from the moment an opportunity is created to the day it is won.
Sales pipeline — A sales pipeline is the set of open deals a team is working, arranged by the stage each one has reached, from first conversation to signed contract.
Sales velocity — Sales velocity is how quickly a pipeline turns into revenue: the value a team closes per day, given how many deals it works, how large they are, how many it wins and how long they take.
Stalled deal — A stalled deal is an open opportunity that has sat in one stage materially longer than deals at that stage normally do.
Weighted pipeline — Turn the deals in your pipeline into a sales forecast, and see the gap to your target.
Win rate — Win rate is the share of closed deals that were won.

Arkenso Meet

Co-host — A co-host is a participant the host has given meeting controls to, such as admitting people from the waiting room, muting participants and removing disruptive guests, so the host does not have to manage everything alone.
Local recording — Local recording saves a meeting recording to the computer of the person who records it, rather than to the meeting provider’s servers.
Meeting passcode — A meeting passcode is a short code someone must enter, as well as having the meeting link, before they can join a video meeting.
Meeting waiting room — A waiting room in a video meeting holds people who open the meeting link in a separate lobby until a host lets them in, so nobody can walk into a meeting uninvited.
Peer-to-peer video call — A peer-to-peer video call sends audio and video directly between participants’ devices instead of routing it through a central media server.
Screen sharing — Screen sharing shows what is on your screen, a single window or a browser tab to the other people in a call, so they can follow a document, a demo or a problem as it happens.
Video conferencing — Video conferencing is a live meeting between people in different places using video and audio over the internet, usually with screen sharing and chat, from a browser, an app or a meeting-room system.
WebRTC — WebRTC is an open web standard that lets browsers send audio, video and data directly to each other in real time, without plugins or a downloaded app.

Arkenso Docs

CSV file — A CSV file is a plain-text table in which each line is a row and the values in a row are separated by commas.
DOCX file — A DOCX file is a word-processing document in the Office Open XML format, the default file type for Microsoft Word since 2007.
PPTX file — A PPTX file is a presentation in the Office Open XML format, the default file type for Microsoft PowerPoint since 2007.
Real-time collaboration — Real-time collaboration means several people editing the same document, spreadsheet or presentation at the same time, each seeing the others’ changes and cursors appear within moments.
SUMIF — SUMIF is a spreadsheet function that adds up the values in a range that meet one condition, such as all sales in the North region or every invoice over $1,000.
VLOOKUP — VLOOKUP is a spreadsheet function that looks for a value in the first column of a table and returns a value from another column in the same row.
XLOOKUP — XLOOKUP is a spreadsheet function that searches one range for a value and returns the matching item from another range.
XLSX file — An XLSX file is a spreadsheet in the Office Open XML format, the default file type for Microsoft Excel since 2007.