Definitions below are condensed from CONTEXT.md, the repo's own domain
glossary: the same language used in code, in the app, and across these
docs. Terms not covered here (mostly Org API delivery mechanics like
webhooks and idempotency keys) aren't part of CONTEXT.md's business
glossary; they're documented on the API pages linked at the bottom.
Customer, Property, System
Customer: A homeowner or buyer whose identity can exist across solarOS independently of any one contractor organization. Contact is a deliberately shallow Customer type (just email + first name, no property required); Company is the third record type. See Concepts: data model.
Property: A service location or address associated with a Customer and accessed by one or more contractor organizations.
Site: The monitoring-surface name for a monitored Property, the same entity as Property, called "Site" inside the Monitoring app because it matches the provider's own concept. See Concepts: data model's note on why "Site" isn't a separate data model concept.
System: A physical energy system installed at a Site (a solar array, battery, or comparable equipment group) that one or more monitoring devices report telemetry for. A Site may hold several Systems.
Fleet: The whole set of monitored Sites an organization has active monitoring access to. Scale-agnostic (10 Sites or 1,000); not a separate record.
Sales: Lead → Opportunity → Quote → Contract → Project
Lead: A contractor organization's prospect or intake record before it becomes a customer relationship, property access, or sales opportunity. See Leads vs. Opportunities.
Opportunity: A contractor organization's sales pursuit tied to a Customer and usually a Property, advanced through pipeline stages. Originates from a converted Lead or is created directly.
Quote: A customer-facing sales proposal created inside a contractor organization, usually tied to a Customer, Property, and Opportunity, with priced scope.
Contract: A customer-facing agreement document created from a Quote and compatible Contract Template, with delivery, signature, voiding, and provider status tracked by solarOS.
Project: The operational container for execution work for a contractor organization, associated with a Customer and usually a Property.
See Concepts: data model for the full Lead → Opportunity → Quote → Contract → Project chain and each stage's status values.
Field service
Work Order: The executable unit of field or service work inside a Project.
Service Appointment: The scheduled calendar booking for a Work Order: time, assigned team members, dispatch state, and customer-facing arrival window.
Case: The organization's tracked record of a customer's service issue (hardware defect, workmanship, monitoring, billing), worked by its Business Owner through queue semantics. The only customer-facing service record. See Concepts: data model: Work Orders vs. Cases.
Monitoring
Alert: A monitoring-generated, Site-attached record of a condition needing organization attention, worked through the Alert Lifecycle from detection to closure. Never auto-creates sales or service records; a human always chooses the action.
Provider Maintenance Plan: A provider-sold recurring service plan
that may include solarOS-powered monitoring, with pricing and packaging
controlled by the provider. This is the sellable plan; the homeowner's
enrollment in one is tracked as a Subscription record
(SubscriptionStatus in
Concepts: data model); CONTEXT.md doesn't
give "Subscription" its own glossary entry separate from the plan.
Device health: Not a CONTEXT.md term with its own entry; see
Device health for how the green/amber/red
status is computed in code.
Custom fields and integrations
Custom Field: A Field a company defines for itself, created from scratch or duplicated from a Platform Field, with a label, an Answer Format, instructions, and choices when the format needs them.
External Reference: An organization-scoped link between a solarOS record and the identifier used for that record in an external system: the mechanism Idempotency & external references and Migrate from another CRM build on.
External Record Link: Distinct from External Reference: an organization-scoped, navigable pointer from a solarOS record to a related record in an external system (the Salesforce Account behind a Case, for example), written by the org's own integration after solarOS fires a webhook.
Not covered in CONTEXT.md
CONTEXT.md documents solarOS's business language: sales, project
execution, service, and customer-facing agreements, not Org API delivery
mechanics. These terms are documented on the API pages instead:
- Org API Key, Scope: API: authentication.
- Idempotency Key: Errors and Idempotency & external references.
- Webhook: Webhooks (stub: full event/payload detail not yet written here).
TODO(owner, likely product): if any of these API terms should graduate
into CONTEXT.md's own glossary as shared business language (not just
implementation detail), raise that with whoever owns CONTEXT.md edits
rather than adding them here first: this page is meant to mirror
CONTEXT.md, not extend it.