Reference

Glossary

Plain-language definitions of the terms used across Ventura.

Engagement

A unit of client work (a file). Belongs to one client; carries an owner, status, economics, and time. In the agency vertical, an engagement is a job/project.

Engagement Partner

The owner of an engagement. A per-engagement assignment, not a global role.

Pursuit (opportunity)

An open business-development deal moving through stages from lead to won or lost.

Relationship

A referral partner or centre of influence you nurture with give-first touches on a cadence.

Touch

A meaningful contact with a relationship or client — an intro, a resource, a meeting — logged manually or auto-captured from email/calendar.

Now / Next

Your daily task list: Now is the Top 2 that matter today; Next is everything queued behind them.

Top 2

The two highest-priority Now tasks assigned to a person for the day. Ventura keeps Now intentionally short — exactly two — so the day has a clear, finishable focus; the cap is enforced at the database.

File health

An engagement's status pill (Healthy / Watch / At risk / Setup needed / Paused), computed from flags like missing next action or slipping recovery.

Recovery

How much you realize versus the standard value of the work. The core money discipline; compared against a firm target and breakeven rate.

WIP

Work in progress — unbilled value sitting on a file, waiting for a billing review.

Engagement kind

Project (scoped/fixed), Retainer (ongoing monthly allotment), or Internal (non-billable internal work, excluded from recovery).

Retainer burn

For a retainer engagement, this month's logged hours versus the monthly hours allotment.

Rate tier

The rate-card tier a person bills and costs at (Partner / Manager / Senior / Staff). Snapshotted onto each time entry.

Utilization

Client hours divided by total tracked hours, against a firm target (often 80%).

Effective rate

Revenue divided by hours on a piece of work — the realized $/hr, compared to target and breakeven.

Firm cockpit

The partner-only Firm workspace: financials, forecast, monthly review, and firm-wide analytics.

RLS

Row-level security — the database boundary that isolates each firm's data and enforces who can read what.

Workspace

One of Ventura's top-level areas — Tasks, Referrals, Pursuits, Clients, Playbooks, Library, Jobs, Meet, Firm — plus Settings. (Jobs appears only when the firm enables it.)

Service line

A category of work (e.g. tax, advisory, bookkeeping, retainer) used to group engagements for the service-line library and pricing.

Give-First Ledger

The running record of what you give a relationship — intros, resources, time — before what you get back. The give-first discipline behind referral growth.

BD Discovery

A default internal, non-billable engagement for prospect or scoping work done before a real client engagement exists. Excluded from recovery; a partner can reassign the time later if it becomes a real engagement.

Finance-protected economics

Dollar fields — rates, time value, cost, margin, WIP, A/R, realization — stored in finance-gated tables and readable only by partner / finance roles, enforced by RLS.

Composite score

The planner's priority score for a task, combining impact, urgency, and risk. It ranks the list, but a person's actions (Complete, Defer, Ignore) remain the ground truth.

Job

A unit of production work under an engagement that moves through a workflow's stages (e.g. a campaign, a website build, a filing). An optional layer a firm turns on; its stage work flows into the assignee's Tasks.

Workflow

A named sequence of stages a job moves through (e.g. Brief → Creative → Review → Live). Firms edit their own in Settings → Job workflows.

Stage

One step in a workflow. The final stage is terminal — reaching it completes the job — and any stage can be flagged as a client-review step.

Playbook

A reusable checklist for repeatable work (onboarding, a monthly cycle, a pitch). Run it against an engagement and its steps land in the runner's Tasks, due-dated.

Library

The firm's searchable store of reusable knowledge — document templates, boilerplate snippets, links to assets, and reference notes you copy or open.

Starter pack

The service lines, Playbooks, and Library items a firm receives when it's created, matched to its type (finance/advisory or marketing agency).