Core concepts
The vocabulary the rest of the documentation uses — organizations, entities, signals, tasks, actions, and Vavan Core that ties them together.
This page defines the terms used across the Vavan docs. If you have not yet read the platform architecture, start there for how these concepts fit together; this page is the reference for each one. All of these concepts are represented in the ontology — Vavan's shared, typed model of a business.
Glossary at a glance
| Concept | One-line definition |
|---|---|
| Organization | The isolation boundary — one customer's data, scoped by row-level security. |
| Entity / Account | The central business object: a company you sell to or serve. |
| Contact / Person | A person associated with an entity. |
| Product | A catalog item that orders consume. |
| Order | A purchase, with line items, that consumes products. |
| Signal | An event surfaced by rules or AI that needs attention. |
| Task / Next Best Action | The recommended action a signal produces, assigned to a person. |
| Action | A write that mutates Vavan Core with built-in rules and side effects. |
| Vavan Core | The shared typed model tying every object and link together. |
| Credit | The per-organization ledger used for billing and rewards. |
Organizations
Organization
An organization is the isolation boundary on the Vavan platform. Each customer's data is scoped to its organization, and access is enforced with row-level security so that one organization can never read or write another organization's objects. Integration credentials also live per-organization — encrypted and scoped to that organization, never stored in shared application configuration. See Security & isolation for how isolation is enforced end to end.
Business objects
Entity / Account
An entity — also called an account — is the
central business object: a company you sell to or serve. An entity becomes a
customer once it has its first order or contract, marked by
a customer since date; before that it is a prospect moving
through the sales pipeline. The pipeline stages are:
- Lead
- Qualified
- Fact Finding
- Quote
- Credit App
- Won / Lost
An entity is an object type in
Vavan Core, with properties (such as
its stage and customer since date) and
links to its contacts, orders, and
sites.
Contact / Person
A contact (or person) is an individual associated with an entity — for example a buyer, an operations manager, or a billing contact. Contacts are linked to their entity, so the people you work with are always anchored to the company they belong to.
Product
A product is a catalog item — the goods or services a business sells. Products are referenced by orders, which lets the platform track what is being sold, to whom, and how consumption changes over time.
Order
An order is a purchase made by an entity, composed of line items that consume products. Orders are what turn an entity into a customer (via the first order's date) and are the basis for consumption-driven signals such as a reorder coming due.
Operational primitives
Signal
A signal is an event surfaced by rules or AI that needs attention. Signals capture conditions across the business — for example churn risk, a reorder due, a hot lead, a stalled deal, or an overdue follow-up. A signal is detected against Vavan Core, so it references the same objects every app shares; that is why a signal raised in one app can drive work in another.
Task / Next Best Action
A task — also called a next best action — is the recommended action a signal produces, assigned to a person. Where a signal says something needs attention, a task says here is the specific thing to do, and who owns it. This turns detection into accountable work instead of an alert that sits unread.
Action
An action is a write that mutates Vavan Core with built-in rules and side effects. Actions are how state changes happen: rather than editing raw records, an action applies a defined operation — validating inputs, enforcing rules, and triggering any downstream effects — keeping the model consistent and auditable. See action types for how actions are defined.
The model and the ledger
Vavan Core
Vavan Core is the shared typed model that ties everything above together: every concept on this page — entities, contacts, products, orders, signals, tasks, actions — is an object type or relationship within it. Because all apps and agents read and write the same Core, work flows across the platform with no point-to-point integration. See the Vavan Core overview for the full model.
Credit
A credit is a unit in the per-organization credit ledger used for billing and rewards. Each organization has its own ledger; credits are consumed by metered usage and can be granted as rewards, all scoped to that organization.