GLS · Glossary
Glossary of terms
Hardware, spares, Fleet, QBR Pack, and more.
4 min read
Terms used throughout AssetSort and this Help Center.
- Hardware
- A physical device — laptops, monitors, network equipment, printers — tracked with a status, cost, warranty, purchase date and the people it's assigned to. Added by hand, or synced from Intune and Entra.
- Licence
- A software licence. Either a subscription that renews monthly or annually, or a perpetual licence owned outright with an optional maintenance end date. Carries a seat count and the assignments consuming it.
- Assignment mode
- Whether a licence's seats are consumed by people (named-user seats) or by devices (per-machine seats). Exactly one lane, never both. Microsoft licences pick their own; manual licences default to people.
- Certificate
- A digital certificate — TLS/SSL for websites and servers, code signing, client/S-MIME or a CA certificate. Distinct from a Certification, which is an organisational compliance certification like ISO 27001, and from an App Credential.
- App credential
- A Microsoft 365 app-registration client secret, key credential or SAML token-signing certificate, synced read-only from Entra and tracked for expiry like any other renewal.
- Spare
- A hardware status for a device you own but keep on the shelf rather than in use. Excluded from in-service counts, Home, renewals and spend-by-tag, raises no alerts, runs nothing and is assigned to nobody, but still counted in total inventory value — Fleet, Insights and reports show spares apart from the in-service fleet. Only visible once spares tracking is switched on for the organisation. Formerly called B-Stock.
- Retired
- A hardware status for equipment out of service for good (a manually tracked device can still be reactivated). The one status under which a Microsoft 365-synced device can be deleted while the connection is live.
- Expiry lead time
- The organisation-wide window, default 14 days (1–365), that decides how far ahead something counts as Expiring or Renewing Soon. Certificates use their own warning time, which starts from it for most types. Days are whole calendar days: something due on 14 November is due all that day and overdue from the 15th. Set by the owner in Settings → Organization → Defaults, where it's labelled Expiry & renewal alert window.
- Device lifecycle
- The organisation-wide refresh cycle, default 3 years (1–20), added to a device's purchase date to work out its end-of-life date — for every device, Microsoft 365-synced ones included. Set by the owner in Settings → Organization → Defaults.
- Fleet
- The cross-client view on MSP → Fleet — devices, seats, spend, alerts, renewals and security across your workspace and managed clients. For owners, admins and read-only Users (their assigned clients only); Growth plan and above.
- My queue
- The cross-client work list for MSP owners, admins and techs: alerts, retirement work and what falls due soon across the clients you cover (every client and your own workspace for owners and admins, your assigned clients for techs), with the action on each row.
- MSP workspace
- An organisation you've set up (MSP → Clients → Make this my MSP workspace) to manage separate client organisations, each fully isolated with its own data.
- Managed client
- A client organisation an MSP workspace manages — isolated data, with MSP staff access scoped per client. Covered by the MSP's plan; one the MSP creates belongs to the MSP's owner.
- Hand-over
- Ending an MSP relationship by passing a managed client to its own administrator, who becomes the owner. The organisation keeps all its data; the MSP's staff lose access.
- Archived (closed)
- An organisation or client that has been closed: read-only on every path for 30 days (no edits, members, integrations or alert changes; view, export, restore and delete permanently still work), restorable during that time, then permanently deleted.
- Former person
- Someone marked as left. They keep their history under People → Former, can't be given anything new, and can be reinstated.
- Custom type
- An item type your organisation adds in Settings → Custom Data → Types, offered next to the built-in hardware and certificate types — and as the only types for licences.
- Dependency
- A link saying one item relies on another — a certificate deployed on a server, a licence installed on a device, a licence or certificate that depends on another item. Insights → Dependencies follows the chains to show what an outage reaches.
- QBR Pack
- The Client QBR Pack — a branded PDF combining executive KPIs, inventory, spend, renewals, what's due and the last 90 days of alert activity, plus a security checklist when there's a recent Microsoft 365 assessment. Built live from an organisation's data.
- Tag
- A coloured label attached to hardware, licences or certificates, used to organise items and drive Tag Actions.
- Tag Actions
- A scoped mini-dashboard and bulk-operation tool built from a tag selection — statistics plus bulk tag, assignment, export and reporting actions.
- Structure
- The folder tree hardware, licences and certificates are filed in, representing sites or departments — separate from tags. Everything starts under Root; there are no pre-made folders.
- Billing anchor
- The first workspace you own (normally the one you set up when you signed up). It holds the plan that every other workspace you own — and every client you manage — inherits, and it can't be linked as a managed client.