Glossary

Geography and data

Forward sortation area (FSA) The first three characters of a Canadian postal code, such as M5V or K1A. The platform's basic geographic unit. Nothing more specific than an FSA is ever stored.

Geographic identifier The FSA code identifying an area. In CSV uploads, the column that holds it.

Region A named group of FSAs — a territory, catchment, or service area. Regions are what you balance and optimize.

Metric A number stored for an area: a count such as active clients, or a rate such as completion rate. See Metrics Reference.

Coverage health An indicator of how completely your own source system populates a metric — good, fair, poor, or unavailable. A poorly covered metric reads as a low number rather than as missing data, which makes it actively misleading.

Data source Where a team's data comes from: an API connection to a vendor, or CSV upload. One per team.

Sync A run that pulls fresh data from an API source and replaces the team's metric values. Runs daily, and on demand.

Data freshness How old the current data is. Shown on the monitoring dashboard.

Aggregate data Counts and rates about a group, rather than records about individuals. Everything the platform stores is aggregate.

Caseload and balance

Caseload The total work assigned to a worker, region, or team — clients, visits, and hours.

Balance How evenly caseload is distributed across regions. Also the name of the optimization area in the sidebar.

Imbalance / drift Distribution moving away from even over time, as clients and staff change while boundaries do not.

Contiguity / adjacency Whether a region is made of connected areas. A region in disconnected pieces balances well on paper and is unworkable in practice.

Compactness How tightly grouped a region is. More compact means less travel and less freedom to balance the numbers exactly.

Optimization

Optimization run (job) A single attempt to find a better assignment of areas to regions, against objectives you set.

Objective A metric the run tries to balance, with a weight saying how much it matters relative to the others.

Constraint A limit on the result — number of regions, contiguity, compactness, or how much may change.

Deviation budget In a Boundary Rebalance, the cap on how much can change: a maximum number of areas moved, or a maximum percentage.

Movement One area changing from its current region to a proposed one. The movement table lists them all.

Convergence How a run's solution improved over its iterations. A curve that flattens early means the search found what it was going to find.

ReCom MCMC The recommended approach. Advanced redistricting that produces high-quality contiguous regions.

Boundary Rebalance An approach that keeps your existing boundaries and moves only a few adjacent areas, within a deviation budget you set.

Genetic algorithm (GA) An optimization technique that evolves candidate solutions over generations. Available with and without geographic contiguity enforced.

AI-Powered (Generative) An approach that uses a language model to balance territories and explain its reasoning in plain language.

Scenario / configuration A saved set of region assignments from the Preview sandbox. Can be used as a report source, as a starting point for a run, or as a view in the Data Editor.

Preview sandbox The what-if workspace where you move areas by hand without affecting live data.

Platform and access

Organization Your company as a whole. Administered through Manage Tenant.

Team A workspace inside an organization, with its own data source, regions, alerts, runs, and reports.

Manage Tenant The organization console at /home/organization.

Organization role Owner, admin, or viewer. Governs the Manage Tenant console only.

Team role Owner or member. Governs what you can do inside a team.

Shared credentials Vendor credentials stored once for the organization and inherited by teams.

Single sign-on (SSO) Signing in through your company's Microsoft Entra tenant, with access controlled by your IT team.

SAML The protocol used for enterprise single sign-on.

Auto-provisioning New users who sign in through Microsoft with a registered email domain joining your organization automatically, as a viewer.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) A one-time code from an authenticator app, required at sign-in once enrolled.

Alert A metric, a range, a scope, and a notification setting. Fires when a value moves outside the range.

Severity Whether an alert is a warning or critical. The distinction is yours to define.

Scope Which part of your service area an alert watches: everything, chosen regions, every postal area individually, or chosen postal areas.

Willow The read-only analytical assistant built into the platform.

Report A branded PDF: balance, optimization, or trends.