Tideswell glossary

Tideswell reuses about a dozen nouns everywhere, and several of them mean something narrower here than in general use. This page defines each one on its own terms, so you can read any single entry without having read the one above it. It sits in Core concepts, the reading section of these docs.

Entries are alphabetical. Where a word has a page of its own, the entry points at it.

How do you use this page?

Look the word up, read the two sentences, follow the link if you need the detail. Every entry is written to stand alone, which means a little repetition between them. That is deliberate: this is a page people arrive at from a search result, halfway down.

Two habits will save you time. First, when a screen and this page disagree about a word, the screen wins, because your team may have renamed it. Second, if the word you are stuck on is about who is allowed to do something, go straight to How to work out who can do what in your workspace, which is the whole subject rather than a definition of it.

Look up a word, A to Z

Fourteen words in alphabetical order. Each one says what the thing is, what it is not to be confused with, and where the detail lives.

Channel

A named room in chat, for a topic or a team, where everyone allowed to see it reads the same messages. A channel can be tied to a department, which is what makes a room for one team rather than for the whole company. Who can read and post in a channel follows the same three roles as everything else, covered in How to work out who can do what in your workspace.

Cycle

A named block of dates, like a sprint, that tasks can be put into and filtered by. A cycle belongs to the workspace rather than to one team, so a single cycle can hold Fairgreen Golf Co.'s production work and its marketing work at the same time.

Department

A team inside your workspace, with its own members, its own leads, its own colour and its own task list in the sidebar. Departments do two jobs at once: they group work, and they are how somebody becomes a lead, which raises what that person is allowed to do.

Admins manage them in Settings › Departments. See How to work out who can do what in your workspace.

Display field

The one field whose value titles a record everywhere it appears: in the record list, in links, in mentions and in search results. A new Object starts with its Name field in that role, and an admin can point the Display field picker at a better field later. See Create an Object.

Field

One box of information on a record: a date, an amount, a choice from a list, a link to another record. A field's type decides what it accepts, how it is displayed and whether a list can be narrowed by it, so it is worth choosing deliberately. See Add a field and pick the right type, and read Plan your fields before you add them first.

Milestone

A single dated checkpoint inside a project, such as "samples approved". A milestone marks a moment rather than holding work, so tasks point at the project, not at the milestone.

Module

One switchable area of Tideswell, such as Store, Documents, Purchase orders or Wholesale. An admin chooses which ones your workspace uses in Settings › Modules.

A module that is switched off disappears from the sidebar for everybody at once, so it is the first thing to check when a whole section is missing. See How to work out who can do what in your workspace.

Object

A kind of record your team defines. Tideswell's own empty state glosses it as "a record type your team can fill in, filter and link to elsewhere". Tideswell ships knowing about tasks, purchase orders, suppliers, customers and stock; an Object is how you add Repairs, Fabric trials or Press loans.

You will meet the word twice: Objects is a group in the main sidebar, and Settings › Objects is where an admin builds them. See What is an Object?.

Owner

Who is accountable for a record: a person, a team, both, or neither. An owner is not necessarily the person who created the record, and owning something grants no extra permission, so the owner of a purchase order is not automatically allowed to approve it. See How to move a record through its stages and set an owner.

Record

One entry of an Object: one repair, one supplier, one purchase order. A record holds values in its fields, sits at a stage, can have an owner, and can be linked to other records anywhere in the workspace. See How to add and edit a record.

Role

Your level of access in the workspace: member, lead or admin. Admin is set on a person, lead is earned by leading at least one department, and member is everybody else.

Every permission in Tideswell is expressed as the lowest of those three roles that may do the thing. See How to work out who can do what in your workspace.

Stage

The step a record is currently at, such as Draft, Sent or Received. You choose the words in Settings › Stages, and each one carries a fixed meaning underneath (Not started, In progress, Done and so on) so that renaming a stage does not break approvals or reporting. See The stages a record moves through to set them up and How to move a record through its stages and set an owner to move a record through them.

Sub-task type

One of the kinds of work a team does, named by you in Settings › Sub-task types and offered when somebody breaks a task down. Fairgreen Golf Co.'s Production department uses a different set from Marketing, which is what makes a sub-task list read like that team's own checklist rather than a generic one.

Workspace

The private space for one company. Every channel, task, supplier, record and setting belongs to exactly one workspace, and people from outside it see none of them.

Fairgreen Golf Co. is one workspace; its factory, Kaimen Knitwear, would be another if it ever used Tideswell.

Which words look alike and are not the same?

These five pairs cause more confusion than the rest of the vocabulary put together, and each one has a practical consequence.

• Object and record. The Object is the shape (Repairs, with its fields and stages); the record is one entry (repair RPR-1042). Admins build Objects in Settings › Objects and everybody works with records from the sidebar.
• Department and channel. A department is a team with a roster and leads; a channel is a room where messages are posted. A channel can be tied to a department, but the department is what carries permissions.
• Module and permission. A module that is switched off hides a whole area from everybody. A permission you do not hold hides something from you alone. The fix is different, so tell them apart first using How to work out who can do what in your workspace.
• Owner and creator. The owner is who is accountable now; the creator is who typed it in originally. Changing the owner does not rewrite the history, which stays as it was recorded in How to comment on a record and see its history.
• Stage and field. A stage is where the record is in its life, chosen from one list. A field is a value on the record. A record only shows a Status control when an admin has given its Object a set of stages.

Which of these words does your team choose?

Several of them are yours to name, which is why these docs describe them rather than quoting them. Your Objects have the singular and plural names you gave them, your stages read in your words, your departments are yours, and each department names the thing it plans.

At Fairgreen Golf Co., the Production department plans Preps and Marketing plans Editorials, and both are the same feature. So when a page here says "your team's planning unit" or "your Object's stages", look at your own screen for the actual word.

Screen names that these docs give in bold, such as Settings › Objects, are fixed and will read exactly as written. See Rename, reorder or retire an Object for what happens to existing links when you change a name.

Where should you go next?

If you are defining how your workspace works, start at What is an Object?, which covers Objects from planning through to permissions.

If you are using a workspace somebody else set up, start at Working with records. And if a number on screen is not what you expected, How to read Tideswell's numbers and dates explains what a blank, a dash and a currency symbol each mean.