Glossary

Look up one term. Each entry is a paragraph and a pointer to the canonical reference. Alphabetical.

Anniversary touch

A scheduled follow-up sent to a past client around the date of a closing — usually a check-in note, a market update, or a referral nudge. Anniversary touches are handled by the alerts system, not by the pipeline state machine. A repeat transaction with a past client creates a new lead; it does not loop CLOSED back into QUALIFIED. See state machine card.

Archive (state)

The canonical state ARCHIVED. A lead set aside because of timeout (21 days in CONTACTING with no response, or 180 days in QUALIFIED with no progress) or manual archive. Not terminal — an archived lead can re-enter the active pipeline via the lead_re_engaged transition. Don’t confuse archive (a state on the state machine) with trash (a different state, with a different recovery path). See state machine card.

Audit trail

The append-only record of every state change, flag set, and assignment for a lead. Each entry has an actor (Scribe or a named agent), a timestamp, the before/after state, and an optional reason code. The audit trail is the truth of how a lead got where it is; the column it sits in is a derived view. See why event sourcing matters.

Canonical state

One of the 8 abstract pipeline stages — NEW, CONTACTING, QUALIFIED, COMMITTED, IN_CONTRACT, CLOSED, ARCHIVED, TRASHED. The state machine operates on canonical states. Older parts of the platform store status in different vocabularies (per-lead, per-buyer, per-seller); the canonical state is the single source of truth and the legacy values are kept in sync as a projection. See state machine card.

Demotion event

A reverse state transition — COMMITTED → QUALIFIED after deal_collapsed, or IN_CONTRACT → QUALIFIED after contract_voided. Demotion is a real event with analytical value, not a failure to track. The state machine requires a reason code on every demotion. See state machine card.

Flag (communication flag)

A row that captures a lead’s communication preferences — unsubscribed, dnc, do_not_email, do_not_text, or do_not_call. Flags are mutable (set, clear, re-set) and they compose (a lead can carry several at once). A flag is not a pipeline state and never will be — they answer different questions. See communication flags.

Lifecycle

The whole picture: the canonical state, the engagement temperature, and the active communication flags taken together. “Lifecycle” is also the name of the feature shipped 2026-05-16 — the Kanban board, the detail-page card, the timeline, and the underlying event log. The lifecycle reference at /reference/lifecycle/ is the one-page tour.

Pipeline stage

Synonym for canonical state when speaking informally. “Pipeline stage” is the broker / sales language; “canonical state” is the technical name for the same eight values. They mean the same thing.

Projection

Translating a canonical state into one of the older status fields the platform already had. A canonical QUALIFIED projects to the per-lead status qualified and the per-buyer status searching (default). Projection runs one direction reliably; the inverse (older status → canonical state) is lossy by design and picks a safe fallback when ambiguous. You don’t usually need to think about projection — it’s the mechanism that keeps older parts of the UI in sync. See the projection table in the lifecycle reference.

Reason code

A short tag attached to a reverse or terminal transition that records why the move happened. Reverse transitions require one — deal_collapsed, contract_voided, bogus_contact_detected. The state machine refuses the transition without it. The reason code is what makes “Lead B fell out of COMMITTED” countable across the board, not just reportable per-lead. See state machine card.

Re-engagement

The path an archived lead can take back into the active pipeline. ARCHIVED → CONTACTING via lead_re_engaged, triggered either by a manual reactivation or by a behavioral signal (temperature score climbing back past 30 within 7 days). Re-engagement is why archive isn’t terminal. See state machine card.

Scribe

The platform’s system actor. Events written by Scribe are automatic — intake, computed temperature crossings, SLA breaches, scheduled timeouts. Events with a named agent attached are human-entered. Scribe is not a robot or an AI assistant; it’s a deliberately personified system identity, branded with the Feather icon, so the timeline reads as a continuous record rather than a mix of “system” and named entries. If you see Scribe in the timeline, the platform did it. If you see an agent name, a human did it.

SLA

Service-level agreement — used in this product specifically to mean the 5-minute first-contact target on NEW leads. There’s exactly one SLA at present; “the SLA” is unambiguous. Breach today is visibility-only, not alerting. See SLA targets.

Temperature

A numeric engagement score (0 to ~100) summarizing how active a lead is right now. Three bands: Cold (< 30), Warm (30 ≤ score < 70), Hot (≥ 70). Temperature is orthogonal to pipeline state — a QUALIFIED lead can be Hot or Cold and the tactic for each is different. The score decays when a lead is silent, climbs when they engage. See temperature signals and why state and temperature are separate.

Timeline

The chronological event list on a lead’s detail page. The timeline shows every state transition, every flag set or cleared, every logged outreach, and every system-emitted event, oldest to newest. The timeline is rendered from the audit trail; reading it answers “why is this lead in QUALIFIED?” or “who reassigned this last week?”.

Trash (state)

The canonical state TRASHED. A lead with bad contact information — fake phone, bounced email, obvious junk. Trash is not a delete and not permanent: the moment the contact information is updated to something valid, contact_info_updated re-enters the lead at NEW with a fresh SLA clock. See state machine card.

State machine card — the canonical states, transitions, and reason codes
Temperature signals — the score, the bands, and the decay
Communication flags — the five flags and how they compose
SLA targets — the 5-minute first-contact target
Lifecycle reference — the whole model on one page