Glossary
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.
The trade
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| PSA | 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. |
Contracts, time and money
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Contract | 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. |
| Work type category | The label on a time entry that decides whether it bills and at what rate. See Log billable time with categories. |
| Billing verification | The sign-off step that walks every hour in a window before invoices are issued. See Verify a billing period. |
| Invoice | The issued bill. Once issued it locks; it is not edited afterwards. |
| Credit note | The document that corrects an issued invoice. See Billing corrections. |
| FX rate book | The append-only record of exchange rates. Reconciliation totals are grouped by document type, never summed across them. See FX additivity. |
| Project / phase / milestone | Project work is tracked in phases and released for invoicing by milestone, so it does not need a dummy ticket. See Bill project work. |
Access, records and history
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Org | 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. |
The product's own vocabulary
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Instant-first | The interaction rule: writes apply immediately and can be undone, with no Save button to chase. See Instant-first interaction. |
| Optimistic write | A write the client applies before the server confirms it. It carries a version so a conflict is detected rather than overwritten. |
| Surface | One screen of the product, such as the ticket list or the FX rate book. The in-app help panel is organized by surface. |
| Read model | The stable reporting views (ops.v1_*) that reports and BI tools read instead of the write tables. See The read model view catalogue. |
| Customization manifest | The versioned export of everything an org has customized. An upgrade preflight reads it. See Customize without code. |
| Agent | An AI helper that proposes work and runs only after a person approves the plan. See Your first agent run. |
| Agent run | One execution of an agent, with its plan, approvals and ledger entries kept together. |
| BYOK | Bring your own key: the org supplies model provider credentials instead of using a hosted default. See Bring up AI with your own API keys. |
| Plugin | An add-on distributed as a signed artifact, with a declared capability list and a consent screen. See Configure the plugin consent flow. |
| Capability | One thing a plugin may do, declared up front. The declared list is what the person installing it consents to. |
| Digest | The hash that pins an artifact's contents. A digest mismatch stops an install. |
| Connector | A first-party link to an outside system (an RMM, DNS, accounting). A plugin is a wider thing than a connector. |
Running it
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Self-host | 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. |
| N−2 window | You can upgrade from either of the two previous tagged releases, not from any older one. See The upgrade compatibility policy. |
| Expand-then-contract | A migration adds the new shape, both shapes work, then the old one is removed in a later release. It is why an upgrade can be rolled back. |
| Digest-pinned image | A container reference that names both a tag and a digest. The digest is what runs. |
| Live leg | The streamed connection that carries live updates to an open page. It has to survive the proxy without buffering. See Reverse proxy and TLS. |
| Quarantine | Where the optional malware scanner puts a message it will not deliver. See Watch your self-hosted services. |