Glossary
One A-to-Z list. Entries marked (administrators) describe things only a System Administrator sees; you can skip them.
Knowing a word here does not give you permission to do the thing it names. For permissions, see Roles and access matrix.
A
Activation — Registering one installation against a licence key. A live server and a test server are two activations. (administrators)
Activation limit — How many installations one licence key may register at once. Separate from the worker limit. (administrators)
Activation proof — Evidence that this installation is registered. It expires after 30 days unless refreshed by a heartbeat. (administrators)
Agent — Someone who works on tickets. You become one
by getting Work access to a department (or
Admin, or a SystemAdmin grant); there is
no separate agent role. The product's Agent workspace —
the nav item labelled Agent — is where this work
happens. Inside the product, the same ticket-working capability is also
called worker+: the "plus" marks someone who can
work a department's tickets, not only submit them.
Agent and worker+ are one role under
two names. It is distinct from worker, which is the
wider licence-counting set — see that entry.
Append-only — New audit entries are added and old ones are never edited or deleted by the software. It is not the same as tamper-proof.
Apply — The stage of an import that actually creates records. Everything before it is checking. (administrators)
Approval gate — A rule that blocks a ticket status change until a specific named approval is recorded.
Approver — Someone asked to decide one specific approval. It is a per-request assignment, not a standing role.
Audit Administration — The screen for searching and exporting audit history. Needs System Administrator access and step-up. (administrators)
Audit history — The record of what happened in the product: who did what, and when.
B
Bounded — Deliberately limited. A bounded list is capped on purpose, often so it cannot show you records you are not allowed to see.
Break-glass access — Keeping one local administrator account in reserve, so you can still sign in if your company's sign-in system fails. (administrators)
Break-glass reveal — The separate emergency process for viewing one redacted item. It needs two people. See Reveal.
C
Checkout — Submitting the tickets you have selected. It has nothing to do with payment. Nothing in the product charges you money. 1
Clear local license — Deletes the stored licence key and state from this server. Keeps the installation's identity. (administrators)
Customer Area — The signed-in part of the website a customer arrives from, run by the organization that operates this installation. It is not part of BareBones Ticketing.
Customer Portal requester — A customer who arrives from the Customer Area through a signed handoff. Their access lasts at most eight hours.
D
Demo data — The seeded Aster Bay Manufacturing evaluation dataset, for walking the product with realistic synthetic records. Seeded and purged as one batch from Demo Data in Admin Settings; four of its sample users count against your worker limit. Not for a system carrying live work. See Demo data. (administrators)
Department — The unit that owns queues, workflows, its part of the service catalogue, and SLA settings. Access is granted per department.
Department access — The permission that lets you see or work on a department's tickets, at one of three levels: View, Work, Admin.
Department administrator — Someone with Admin access to a department. Not the same as a System Administrator.
Department fallback — The department's routing rules, used only when a ticket has no service, or its service has no routing rules at all.
Dry run — See Preview.
E
External participant — Someone outside your organization, invited into specific tickets. They sign in through an invitation, not as a staff member.
External-safe attachment — A file marked as suitable for an external participant to see. It is a visibility setting, not a virus or privacy check.
F
Fails closed — When a check cannot be completed, the product refuses the action rather than allowing it. Error messages stay vague on purpose. 2
First-class project association — A real link between a ticket and a project, stored as its own record rather than as text in a field.
First response — The first time someone posts an update on a ticket that the requester can read. Only a public update counts. An internal note does not stop the first-response clock, however much work went into it.
G
Grace — A short period during which the product keeps working after it cannot reach the licensing website. At most 72 hours. It adds no capacity.
Group — A collection of users. Access is given to groups, and departments are mapped to groups. You do not get access as an individual.
H
Health endpoint — One of two web addresses a
monitoring tool can poll without signing in. /health/live
says the process is answering; /health/ready also says it
can reach its database. Neither says the product is working correctly.
(administrators)
Heartbeat — A manual button that refreshes this installation's activation proof with Finlay.works. It is not an automatic background job, and it does not check application health. (administrators)
I
Idempotency key — A value that identifies one import request, so sending it twice does not import the data twice. (administrators)
Identity source — Where an account came from: local password, company directory (LDAP), single sign-on (SAML), import, or Customer Portal. (administrators)
Import profile — A saved definition of how columns in your file map onto fields in the product. (administrators)
Installation identity — The value that identifies this server to the licensing website. It survives restarts, upgrades, and clearing the licence. (administrators)
L
Last-admin protection — The product refuses to remove the last active local System Administrator, so you cannot lock everyone out. (administrators)
M
Materialize — To write data into the product's own database so it can be used, rather than reading it live from elsewhere. This manual avoids the word. (administrators) 3
N
No-op — An action that changes nothing, because the result was already in place. Adding a watcher who is already watching is a no-op.
O
Organization tenant — Your organization's single set of records. One installation holds exactly one.
Outbox — The internal queue of emails waiting to be sent. (administrators)
Owner — The one person accountable for a ticket. Only someone with Work access to the ticket's department can be an owner.
P
Participant — Someone inside your organization added to a ticket to collaborate on it. They can see that ticket and nothing more. 4
Posture — A word v1 used for "the current state of something". This manual does not use it. Read it as "state" or "setting".
Preflight — Checking an import file before anything is created. It reports each row as ready, warning, or blocked. (administrators) 5
Preview — Showing what an action would do, without doing it. Import calls this a dry run; bulk operations call it preview outcomes.
Product use — Whether the licence currently permits changes on this installation. It is one switch for the whole installation and gives no person any access.
Project — A named piece of work that tickets can be linked to. Projects have their own staffing and are owned by a department.
Project association — The one active link between a ticket and a project. Creating it does not reassign the ticket.
Project manager — Someone named to look after one project's content. It gives no department or ticket access.
Project role — A named staffing slot on a project, such as "test lead". Filling it can give someone visibility of the project.
Project-role mapping — A rule saying that whoever fills a project role becomes the owner, a watcher, or a participant on matching tickets.
Projection — A limited view of something larger, showing only what you are allowed to see. This manual says "view" or "list" instead.
Public comment — A comment visible to the requester and to external participants on the ticket. It is not visible on the public internet.
Q
Queue — The list of tickets you can work on. It shows at most 250 rows at a time.
Quick Ticket — The faster path for raising a single ticket when you already know where it belongs, without browsing the service catalogue and adding to a list. It is department-first: it opens with your current requester context and you switch department only if the request belongs elsewhere. Because it need not start from a service, a Quick Ticket may have no service — which is what makes department fallback routing apply to it. Use the Service Catalog instead when you want to browse what is offered or raise several requests at once; use Quick Ticket when you know exactly what you need and it is one thing.
Quiesce — To stop the application writing to the database before a backup or upgrade. You do this yourself; the product has no quiesce button. (administrators)
R
Reconciliation — The report of what an import actually created, changed, or failed to do. It is the authoritative result. (administrators)
Redaction — Hiding information from view. The original is still stored. It is not deletion.
Requester — Whoever the ticket is for. Being a requester needs no department access. You see the tickets you are named on.
Reveal — A one-time, two-person process to view one redacted item. It does not undo the redaction or restore normal visibility. The second person who approves it can be the owning department's manager of record, who does not need to be an administrator.
S
Saved view — Your own saved set of queue filters. It belongs to you alone, is not a shared dashboard, and gives you no extra access.
Seam — A word v1 used for a permission check that must pass on its own. This manual says "check" instead.
Second approver — The distinct second person who must approve a reveal request. You cannot approve your own. (administrators)
Service — An entry in the catalogue describing something people can request. A service belongs to a department.
Service Catalog — The list of services you can request from. Customers see a separate, usually shorter, version of it.
Service-first mapping — If a ticket's service has any routing rule at all, only the service's rules are used and the department's are ignored entirely.
Service-level agreement (SLA) — A timer on a ticket for first response and for resolution. Each of the two runs on either 24/7 wall-clock time or a business calendar's working hours, chosen per target. It is not a support promise.
Business calendar — A named working-time pattern: a timezone, the working hours for each weekday, and dated exceptions for closures or one-off working days. An SLA target set to business hours counts only time inside it. Calendars are versioned, and a policy pins the version it was saved against.
Status category — One of exactly four: Open, Pending, Resolved, Closed. The status names you see on screen are configured separately and map onto these.
Step-up — Being asked to confirm your identity again before something sensitive. It confirms who you are. It does not give you new permission.
System Administrator — Someone holding the
SystemAdmin grant. They administer the installation. It
does not automatically let them work tickets.
T
Ticket History — The list of events shown on a ticket. It is a short allowlisted set, not the full audit history.
Two-person — Requiring two different people. In this product it applies only to revealing redacted information.
W
Watcher — Someone copied in on a ticket to stay informed. They can see that ticket and nothing more. 6
Watermark — A stored marker of how far the product has got, used to tell what is new and ignore out-of-date messages. Not an image overlay. (administrators)
Workflow — The configured statuses a ticket can be in, and the permitted moves between them.
Worker — The unit your licence counts: an internal
user with SystemAdmin access or department access
at any level, including read-only View. Counted once
per person. Requesters and external participants are not workers.
This is a wider set than agent / worker+. Every agent is a worker, but not every worker is an agent: a View-only department member counts toward the licence limit even though they cannot work tickets. So "worker" is the billing term and "agent" (product internal name worker+) is the ticket-working role inside it. (administrators)