Glossary

Short definitions of the words ShiftTracker uses for its own moving parts — seat, pattern, request, proposal, assignment, book-on, check call and arbitration among them. Each is defined as the platform actually uses it rather than as the security industry generally does, and drawn from the product's own code or from the concept pages linked at the end.

Several of these words are ordinary English doing a specific job here. Where the platform's meaning is narrower than the everyday one, the entry says so.

What are the words for the people?

Drawn from Organisation, agency, client — who is who.

Term	What it means here
Organisation	The company that owns the rota. It runs its own sites, employs its own staff, and raises a request when it wants an agency to cover a shift.
Agency	A supplier of officers. It proposes its own officers against the requests shared with it, and rosters those officers. It cannot see the organisation's employees, its patterns, or any other agency.
Client	The company a site is billed to. A client can be given a login to a portal of its own — a coverage dashboard, its invoices, its profile, and nothing else.
Employee	A person the organisation itself employs. Employees use the employee portal for their own shifts, availability, timesheets and leave.
Officer	A guard belonging to an agency. An agency can only put forward officers who have already accepted their login invite.

What are the words for the work?

Drawn from Patterns, seats and ad-hoc shifts.

Term	What it means here
Site	A place cover is provided. Every site is owned by either an organisation or an agency, and may also name the client it is billed to.
Shift pattern	A description of cover that repeats at a site: a start and end time, the days it runs, and how many people it needs.
Seat	One of the people a pattern needs on a given day. A word for the idea, not a word on screen.
Slot	What the screen calls an empty seat. Where a pattern needs more than one person, the empty places are numbered Slot 1, Slot 2, and so on.
Open seat	A place in a pattern's cell for a given day with no shift in it.
Ad-hoc shift	A shift with no pattern behind it — a one-off, collected into its own row at the foot of the week.
Roster	The grid of shifts for a site, opened by week or by month, with a row per pattern or a row per person.

What are the words for filling a shift?

Drawn from How a request becomes a rostered shift, except broadcast, which comes from the broadcast tables in the schema.

Term	What it means here
Request	An ask to agencies to cover exactly one shift: one site, one date, one start and end time, one officer. Asking for more than one officer is refused outright — two guards on one night is two requests.
Share	The act of letting a named agency see a request. A request reaches an agency only once it has been shared with that agency, and an agency sees nothing else.
Proposal	One agency's answer to a request, naming one of its own officers and an hourly rate. A request can hold several.
Assignment	The record made when you confirm a proposal: which officer, from which agency, against which shift. Confirming also copies the shift into that officer's own roster, which is what puts it in front of them.
Broadcast	A shift offered to several people at once. Each of them accepts it, declines it, or lets the deadline pass without answering.

What are the words for the day itself?

Drawn from the shift-status derivation and the check-call dashboard in the code.

Term	What it means here
Book on	The moment somebody starts a shift. A shift with a book-on and no book-off reads as In Progress.
Book off	The moment somebody ends a shift. A shift that has been booked off reads as Completed.
Check call	A call an officer is expected to make at a set time during a shift. Each call has a window; a window that closes without the call reads as Unconfirmed, and can be escalated from the control room.
Missed	Worked out, not recorded: the shift's start time has passed in the organisation's own timezone and nobody booked on. Distinct from No Show, which a manager sets by hand.

What are the words for pay?

Drawn from the arbitration code and the database view that feeds every screen showing what a shift actually ran.

Term	What it means here
Scheduled time	What was planned — the time on the roster.
Actual time	What the book-on and book-off recorded.
Arbitrated time	What was agreed for pay where the first two disagree. Every screen showing what a shift really ran reads the arbitrated time first, then the actual, then the scheduled, so an edit made in arbitration reaches all of them.
Arbitration	The step that settles which of those three a shift is paid on. Where book-on and book-off are both within 15 minutes of the scheduled times it settles automatically; beyond that the shift is flagged for a person to decide.
Dropped	Taken out of both payroll and client invoicing.

Where do these definitions come from?

Every entry above is either taken from one of the three concept pages linked in each section, or read from the part of the codebase that implements it — the status registry and shift-status derivation for the day-of terms, the arbitration helpers for the pay terms, and the schema for the rest. Nothing here describes a capability the product does not have.

This page is the one reference page written by hand rather than generated, because the vocabulary has no single machine source to generate it from. The other two do: see Status reference and Roles and permissions.