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?

Three pages, one question each. Tideswell glossary defines the nouns you meet on screen, from area and channel to stage and workspace.

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

Here is the kind of thing these pages are for. A new merchandiser joins Fairgreen Golf Co., opens the menu down the left, sees Buying › Suppliers but no Purchase orders row under it, and emails an admin asking for access.

No permission would have helped her. The Purchase orders module is switched off for the whole workspace, which is a different screen, a different fix and a different conversation.

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 free text you type in. An owner is not whoever created the record. A module is not a permission.

Those three distinctions 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 changing permission rows for a screen that is switched off for everybody.

When would you use these pages?

Three moments cover most visits.

• Your first week. Read Tideswell glossary straight through. It takes about five minutes, and the rest of the product explains itself afterwards.
• 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. 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.

Why can a colleague see something you cannot?

Three things decide it, in this order: which modules your workspace has switched on, the lowest role each action allows on Settings › Permissions, and your own role. Your departments then decide where 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" gets you nowhere when the whole Purchase orders module is switched off.

How to work out who can do what in your workspace walks the diagnosis in order. Once you know which row you need, How to set who can see and edit an Object covers the rows for one Object.

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.

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 and whose clock decides what "today" means.

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. See What is an Object?.

Your team also names its stages, its departments, the thing each department plans, its sub-task types, its outreach types and its bill reasons. Settings › Terminology goes further: it renames Tideswell's own kinds of record, such as Purchase Order, Supplier, Customer and Task, for everyone in the workspace.

That is why these docs write the default word and point at the setting. 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 or Buying › Purchase orders, that name is fixed and you will find it exactly as written. How to use your own words for Tideswell's records and How to set up the stages a record moves through are where most of the naming happens.

When is another section the better place to start?

Use Getting started with Tideswell instead when you are new and want the tour: the menu, the Create new button and the Agent. Use What is an Object? instead when you already know the words and want to build something.

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 and moving it along.

Come back here when a screen does not match what you expected. That is a different job from any of the other three.

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.