Core concepts

Core concepts is the reading section of these docs. Nothing here is a task you carry out. These three pages explain the words printed on Tideswell's screens, why a colleague can open something you cannot, and what a blank figure means where a zero would have been easier to print.

Spend ten minutes here before you configure anything. Most of what looks like a fault in Tideswell turns out to be a word read the way you would read it anywhere else, where Tideswell means something narrower by it.

What is in this section?

Here is the kind of thing these pages are for. A new merchandiser joins Fairgreen Golf Co., opens the sidebar, sees Repairs but no purchasing anywhere, and emails an admin asking for access.

No permission would have helped her: the whole Purchase orders module is switched off for the workspace, which is a different screen, a different fix and a different conversation. That is one paragraph of one page, read once.

Three pages, one question each. Tideswell glossary defines every noun you will meet on screen.

How to work out who can do what in your workspace explains why two people see two different sidebars. How to read Tideswell's numbers and dates explains how to read a figure, a currency and a date range.

Why does this section exist?

Because the alternative is guessing, and a wrong guess sends you to the wrong person. Tideswell uses about a dozen nouns constantly, and several of them are narrower here than in general use. A stage is not a status you type in.

An owner is not whoever created the record. A module is not a permission.

Those three distinctions in particular have practical consequences. Get the owner one wrong and you will hand somebody ownership of a purchase order expecting it to grant them access, which it does not. Get the module one wrong and you will spend a morning opening permission dials for a screen that is switched off for everybody.

The glossary is also the page to send a new starter on their first morning. Every entry is written to be read on its own, so somebody can look up one word mid-task without reading the four entries above it.

When would you use these pages?

Three moments, and they cover most visits.

• Your first week. Read Tideswell glossary straight through. It is about five minutes and it makes the rest of the product explain itself.
• A screen or a button has vanished. Go to How to work out who can do what in your workspace and work down the checks in order. It is written so you can do most of it yourself, from what you can already see, without waiting on an admin.
• A figure is about to leave the building. Before anybody at Fairgreen Golf Co. pastes a number into a board pack, read How to read Tideswell's numbers and dates. A blank margin means no cost was recorded against those sales, not a product selling at cost, and the two lead to opposite decisions.

Why can a colleague see something you cannot?

Three things stack up to decide it, in this order: which modules your workspace has switched on, your role in the workspace, and the dials set for that particular kind of record. Departments then decide whether you count as a lead.

Because they stack, the same missing screen has more than one possible cause, and the fix differs in each case. Asking an admin for "access to purchasing" when the whole Purchase orders module is switched off gets you nowhere.

How to work out who can do what in your workspace walks the diagnosis in order. Once you know which dial you need, Who can see and edit an Object covers changing it for one kind of record.

Why is a figure blank rather than zero?

Because they mean different things, everywhere in Tideswell. A zero means the answer is genuinely zero. A blank or a dash means nothing was recorded, or the figure could not be worked out, and Tideswell will not paper over that with a zero that looks like a fact.

The same discipline runs through the rest of it. Every amount belongs to a currency, and amounts in different currencies are shown side by side rather than added. A rolling window and a calendar month are not the same period.

A worked-out value tells you how recently it was calculated. How to read Tideswell's numbers and dates covers all of that, including what "Include today" does to a date range.

Which words does your team get to choose?

More than you would expect. An Object is a kind of record your team defines, and you name it yourself in the singular and the plural. So are the stages a record moves through, your departments, and the word a department uses for the thing it plans.

That is why these docs say "your team's planning unit" rather than naming it. At Fairgreen Golf Co. the Production department plans Preps and the Marketing department plans Editorials, and both are correct.

Where a page names a screen in bold, such as Settings › Objects, that name is fixed and you will find it exactly as written. Where a page describes something your team named, it says so. Create an Object and The stages a record moves through are where most of that naming happens.

When is another section the better place to start?

Use What is an Object? instead when you already know the words and want to build something: it covers defining a new kind of record from planning its fields through to deciding who may open it.

Use Working with records instead when somebody else configured the workspace and you just want to get through your day: finding a record, editing it, moving it through its stages and seeing what points at it.

Come back here when a screen does not match what you expected. That is what these pages are for, and it is a different job from either of the other two.

Where should you go next?

Read Tideswell glossary first, all the way through, because the other two pages assume its vocabulary. Then How to work out who can do what in your workspace, which is the page you will send to colleagues most often.

How to read Tideswell's numbers and dates can wait until the first figure surprises you, though it is the shortest of the three.