The words this documentation assumes. Terms are grouped by where you meet them,
not alphabetically, because "what is a board" and "what is an optimistic write"
are asked by different people.
Each entry ends with the page that explains it properly. If a term appears in the
product and is missing here, that is a gap worth reporting through
Get help inside Marula.
Professional services automation: the system an IT service business runs its tickets and its time, its contracts and its billing. Marula is one.
MSP
Managed service provider: the kind of business Marula is built for. It sells ongoing IT support to other companies.
RMM
Remote monitoring and management: the tool that watches client machines. It is a different product, and Marula can take inventory from one. See Your first inventory sync.
Client
A company you support. Its people, devices, contracts and portal accounts belong to it.
Contact
A person at a client. A contact can be given a portal account; staff are not contacts.
Ticket
One piece of work. It carries a client and a board, notes and time, and usually a status.
Board
The set of columns a ticket moves through. Columns are yours to rename; the stage underneath is what SLA, billing, automation and reporting actually bind to. See Customizations are data.
Dispatch
Assigning unscheduled work to a technician's day, usually by dragging on a calendar. See Dispatch from the board.
Day pack
The list of parts and tools a technician needs for today's trips, and where each item comes from. See Work a day pack.
Workbar
The panel on a ticket where notes and tasks are entered, along with time.
CSAT
The satisfaction survey a client answers after a ticket closes. See Set up CSAT surveys.
The agreement that decides what a client is charged. Marula models six kinds: recurring, retainer, time and materials, fixed fee, per unit, per incident. See Contract relationship types.
Retainer / prepaid block
A retainer is a per-period base that includes minutes; a prepaid block is a balance sold up front and drawn down by approved work, oldest block first. Blocks ride time-and-materials and retainer contracts only.
Cap / minimum
The ceiling or floor on what a period bills, before escalation or credits apply.
Change order
An agreed change to a contract's scope or price, recorded rather than edited into the old terms.
Service credit / SLA credit
Money given back when the service missed its promise. It is a credit, not an edit to an issued invoice.
Your workspace. Everything is scoped to it: people, clients, tickets, settings. One instance can hold one org.
Instance
The running deployment: one core API process, a worker, a database, and a cache.
Provenance
The field-level record of who changed what value, from what to what. Actor kinds are human, agent and import. See Provenance vs audit.
Audit
The event-level record of security and administrative actions: sign-ins, vault reveals, consent grants, billing sign-offs.
Actor kind
Whether an edit came from a person, an AI agent run, or an import. Every provenance row carries one.
Portal account
A login for a client's contact. It is fenced to that client and never carries staff access. See The portal isolation model.
Board exposure
The admin setting that decides which boards a portal account can see at all.
Restricted category chain
The permission shape shared by knowledge-base folders and vault categories: access is granted on a folder chain, and an item you were not granted is absent from the list and from search rather than shown locked. See Knowledge-base categories and the secret vault.
Grant
Permission given to something optional, such as an AI helper or a plugin capability. Nothing is granted by default.
Deny-by-default
The rule that an ungranted capability is invisible rather than refused after the attempt. See AI: deny-by-default.
You run Marula on infrastructure you control, on a database you own.
Migration owner vs app role
The database uses two roles: one that may change the schema during a migration, and one that the application runs as, under row-level security. See The local stack.