Operations Glossary · Property Tech

Access log: the append-only record of entries, denials, forced doors and doors held open, with the credential, the access point and the time the lock or reader reported it; evidence for lockout, entry-window and package-room questions, and the most sensitive data in access (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Access point: anything that opens (a unit door, building entry, gate, garage door, elevator, amenity room, package room or locker bank), belonging to a property and, for unit doors, to a unit (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
After-hours intake: covering nights and weekends with an on-call technician, an answering service, a contact center or an AI agent with escalation rules; the emergency definition belongs to the operator's policy and the law, not to whoever answers (Maintenance & Work Orders).
ALPR (automated license plate recognition): plate readers that turn parking enforcement into a database; California regulates their operators, requiring reasonable security and a published usage and privacy policy, and plate reads are treated as location data (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Amenity reservation: booking short-duration shared inventory (a clubhouse, guest suite, court or move elevator), with time-range exclusion for exclusive amenities, per-slot counters for shared ones, per-amenity rules and fees posted as charges (Resident Experience).
Asset register: the list of equipment the owner is responsible for (appliances, water heaters, HVAC, boilers, roofs, elevators) with location, make, model, serial, install date, warranty end and expected useful life; it drives warranty checks, repair-or-replace decisions and reserves (Maintenance & Work Orders).
BEC (business email compromise): fraud in which a message that appears to come from a vendor, owner or executive asks to change where the next payment goes; the controls are a verified change workflow with an out-of-band callback, a first-payment hold and separated duties (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Bid: the process for projects and contracts: a scope, invited or public vendors, a due date, responses, a comparison and an award, with any minimum number of bids held as policy data on the owner or agreement (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Bill: an invoice once captured, which then goes through matching, duplicate detection, coding and allocation, and approval routing; an invoice covering several owners' properties is split into one bill per paying entity (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Biometric credential: a face, fingerprint or similar identifier used to open doors, regulated by laws such as Illinois' BIPA (notice, a written release, a public retention policy); the design these laws push toward is an opt-in alternative, never the only way in (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Change of bank details: a workflow rather than a field edit: a request with its channel, a callback to a contact already on file, account validation and a hold on the first payment to the new account, applied to vendors and to owners' distribution accounts alike (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Chargeback (owner): work the manager's staff performs or a vendor cost rebilled to the owner on a third-party managed property, sometimes with a markup set by the management agreement, posted to the owner's ledger rather than a lease (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Chargeback (resident): a link between a work order and a posted charge for damage the household caused, priced from recorded labor, parts and any markup the lease and law allow, with its basis and evidence, and reversed rather than edited (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Communication kinds: the purposes a property message can have (legal notice, emergency, operational, transactional, community, marketing), each with its own rules; consent is recorded per purpose, so opting out of marketing never silences the tenancy (Resident Experience).
Community wall, classifieds: user-generated posts inside the operator's resident portal, governed by posting rules, staff moderation and a review queue for posts that look like housing ads (Resident Experience).
Credential: what opens an access point: a mobile key, fob or card, PIN, biometric template, or a tracked physical key (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Credential purpose: the reason a credential exists (resident, work order, vendor, staff, guest or delivery, tour), which sets how long it is valid and the event that revokes it; no credential without a purpose record (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Credentialing (vendor compliance): proof before a vendor works that it is insured, licensed for the trade, a legitimate business with a taxpayer ID and, for entry into occupied homes, that its workers are screened; a vendor is compliant for a property, not in general, and the check repeats as documents expire (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Data-on-card lock: an offline lock that learns about grants and revocations only when a credential carrying fresh data touches a reader, which is why revocation can lag (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Duplicate detection (invoices): catching the same invoice arriving by email and by portal (a unique vendor and invoice number) or resubmitted under a new number (fuzzy matching on amount, date and property) (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Emergency (maintenance): a threat to life, safety or the building, such as fire, gas, flooding, no heat in cold weather, no water, a door that won't lock or a sewage backup; the emergency list is configuration per portfolio and routes to a human before any model reasons about it (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Entry notice: the notice state law requires before a landlord enters a home (minimum notice, form, hours, whether a service request counts as consent), modeled as an effective-dated rule plus a record of each notice served, with emergency entries recorded with their justification (Maintenance & Work Orders).
GPO (group purchasing organization): an organization that aggregates many buyers' volume to negotiate prices from national suppliers, funded by supplier fees or rebates on members' purchases (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Habitability (implied warranty of habitability): the duty, read into residential leases in most US jurisdictions, to keep a home safe and fit to live in, measured largely by the housing code; a breach can excuse rent in whole or part (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Inspection: a run of a versioned template (areas, items, rating scales, required photos) for move-in and move-out, annual, preventive, lender, insurer, code or due-diligence reasons; deficient findings create work orders, the work is done offline, and photos are evidence (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Make-ready board: the standard view of turns, showing each unit's stage and its next blocker (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Make-ready (turn): the work that takes a unit from the day the last household leaves to the day it's ready for the next (move-out inspection, trash-out, repairs, paint, flooring, cleaning, final inspection), scheduled backward from the next move-in with ordered, dependent tasks (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Managed catalog: a procurement catalog that restricts staff to approved items at contract prices (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Merchant of record (resident services): whoever sells a resident service: usually the provider, which charges the resident directly; if the operator collects, the charge is on the lease ledger and the operator is responsible for it (Resident Experience).
Package locker, package room: a locker bank or room where a carrier or staff member scans a package in, the household is notified and pickup is recorded; packages are matched to a household rather than a name string and held for a policy-set period (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Parking permit: a vehicle registered to a household for a period for unassigned parking, sometimes limited per unit or with guest passes; vehicles belong to households and permits to leases (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Payer of record: the legal entity recorded as making a vendor payment, whose name and TIN go on the 1099 (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Payment hold: a hold, with a reason, on paying a vendor whose compliance has lapsed, released when the missing document arrives; checked at work order or PO issue, invoice approval and payment release (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Payment run: a batch of approved bills paid out, grouped by paying entity and bank account so one owner's money never pays another owner's bills (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Permission to enter: the resident's answer at intake on whether staff may enter for a request, captured with pets and availability; where it's no or missing, entry notice rules apply (Maintenance & Work Orders).
PM (preventive maintenance): recurring work generated from a schedule attached to an asset, a building or a property (filter changes, detector tests, water heater flushes, code-required inspections), with building-wide in-unit work generating one work order and one entry notice per unit (Maintenance & Work Orders).
PO (purchase order): the operator's commitment to buy (vendor, property, priced lines, GL coding, and the work order or project it serves), issued for one property so the paying entity is known, and the thing an invoice is matched against (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Portal (resident portal, resident app): a client for records the platform already has (account, requests, lease, household, access, coverage, community, amenities, moving), with permissions derived from the person's current lease member roles on every request (Resident Experience).
Priority (work order): emergency, urgent or routine; urgent work makes part of the home unusable, and categories map to priorities through the operator's policy, checked against the law (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Procure-to-pay (P2P, source-to-pay): the chain from requisition through purchase order, receipt, invoice matching and approval to payment, sold whole by the suites and link by link by specialists (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Punchout: the catalog integration in which the buyer leaves the procurement system for the supplier's catalog site, fills a cart, and the cart returns as a requisition with prices and part numbers, using a protocol such as cXML (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Rebate: money returned on virtual card spending or GPO purchases, earned on spending the owner funded; whether the manager keeps, credits or shares it is a management agreement term, so each rebate is recorded by the property and bill that earned it (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Receipt: the recorded fact that goods arrived (what and how much) or, for services, completion of the linked work order; the third leg of a three-way match (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Rekeying: changing locks between households or on request, required by law in some states with a deadline from a start event; whether reissuing an electronic credential satisfies a statute written for keyed locks is a question for legal review (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Repair deadline: a statutory, code or program clock for correcting a condition, keyed by category and severity and by its trigger (the tenant's written notice, service of a violation, an inspection), stored on the work order as respond_by and complete_by with the rule that set them (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Request channel: how a resident reached the operator with a request (portal, app, text, phone, email, walk-in), recorded because it decides whether the request counts as written notice for repair deadlines; a portal or app request is treated as written notice (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Resident services: things a resident buys at home (cleaning, handyman work, dog walking, internet and utility setup, moving help), where the platform records the merchant, who funds any credit, what the operator earns and the provider's own access grant (Resident Experience).
Retaliation: acting against a tenant for a protected act such as a repair notice or habitability complaint, which many states prohibit; retention signals may prioritize outreach and service, never a worse offer or a non-renewal (Resident Experience).
Retention signal: evidence from a household's service history and stated feedback (reopened work orders, slow responses, negative survey answers, unanswered messages) that tells a manager whom to call before the renewal window opens; never drawn from protected characteristics, and always explainable (Resident Experience).
Revocation sync: confirming that a revoked credential has actually reached the vendor cloud and the locks; each credential's sync state (pending, active, revoke pending, revoked, failed) is tracked, failures are retried, and a unit can't be marked ready while a prior-lease credential is unconfirmed (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Sentiment: a model's inferred label on residents' messages or feedback, stored with its model version and kept separate from what residents stated in surveys, and out of decisions the resident can't see or contest (Resident Experience).
Smart access law: a law regulating keyless entry data, such as New York City's Tenant Data Privacy Act (Local Law 63 of 2021): express consent, data minimization, limited uses, no location tracking outside the building, no use to harass or evict, and destruction of authentication data on a deadline (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Smart devices: in-unit and common-area thermostats, leak sensors, hubs, lighting, submeters, parking sensors and cameras; their alerts become work orders, vacant units are managed remotely, and device health is maintenance (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Survey (resident): a check-in triggered by events (after move-in, after a work order closes, before renewal, at move-out), tied to its subject so a bad answer feeds vendor scorecards and reopens or escalates the request (Resident Experience).
Tow request: the record of a vehicle removal: the vehicle, grounds, when and by whom it was first seen, any notice served, the authorizing user, police notification and towing company, with the rule evaluation that permitted it (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Triage: setting a request's category, priority and who does the work (site staff or an outside vendor), and merging duplicate reports of one root cause under one work order (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Two-way match, three-way match: comparing an invoice with its purchase order (vendor, items, prices), and additionally with the receipt or completed work order; invoices within tolerance pass and others go to an exception queue (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
White-label app: a resident app carrying the operator's name, which keeps the resident relationship with the operator rather than building the vendor's audience (Resident Experience).

Access log: the append-only record of entries, denials, forced doors and doors held open, with the credential, the access point and the time the lock or reader reported it; evidence for lockout, entry-window and package-room questions, and the most sensitive data in access (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Access point: anything that opens (a unit door, building entry, gate, garage door, elevator, amenity room, package room or locker bank), belonging to a property and, for unit doors, to a unit (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
After-hours intake: covering nights and weekends with an on-call technician, an answering service, a contact center or an AI agent with escalation rules; the emergency definition belongs to the operator's policy and the law, not to whoever answers (Maintenance & Work Orders).
ALPR (automated license plate recognition): plate readers that turn parking enforcement into a database; California regulates their operators, requiring reasonable security and a published usage and privacy policy, and plate reads are treated as location data (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Amenity reservation: booking short-duration shared inventory (a clubhouse, guest suite, court or move elevator), with time-range exclusion for exclusive amenities, per-slot counters for shared ones, per-amenity rules and fees posted as charges (Resident Experience).
Asset register: the list of equipment the owner is responsible for (appliances, water heaters, HVAC, boilers, roofs, elevators) with location, make, model, serial, install date, warranty end and expected useful life; it drives warranty checks, repair-or-replace decisions and reserves (Maintenance & Work Orders).
BEC (business email compromise): fraud in which a message that appears to come from a vendor, owner or executive asks to change where the next payment goes; the controls are a verified change workflow with an out-of-band callback, a first-payment hold and separated duties (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Bid: the process for projects and contracts: a scope, invited or public vendors, a due date, responses, a comparison and an award, with any minimum number of bids held as policy data on the owner or agreement (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Bill: an invoice once captured, which then goes through matching, duplicate detection, coding and allocation, and approval routing; an invoice covering several owners' properties is split into one bill per paying entity (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Biometric credential: a face, fingerprint or similar identifier used to open doors, regulated by laws such as Illinois' BIPA (notice, a written release, a public retention policy); the design these laws push toward is an opt-in alternative, never the only way in (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Change of bank details: a workflow rather than a field edit: a request with its channel, a callback to a contact already on file, account validation and a hold on the first payment to the new account, applied to vendors and to owners' distribution accounts alike (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Chargeback (owner): work the manager's staff performs or a vendor cost rebilled to the owner on a third-party managed property, sometimes with a markup set by the management agreement, posted to the owner's ledger rather than a lease (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Chargeback (resident): a link between a work order and a posted charge for damage the household caused, priced from recorded labor, parts and any markup the lease and law allow, with its basis and evidence, and reversed rather than edited (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Communication kinds: the purposes a property message can have (legal notice, emergency, operational, transactional, community, marketing), each with its own rules; consent is recorded per purpose, so opting out of marketing never silences the tenancy (Resident Experience).
Community wall, classifieds: user-generated posts inside the operator's resident portal, governed by posting rules, staff moderation and a review queue for posts that look like housing ads (Resident Experience).
Credential: what opens an access point: a mobile key, fob or card, PIN, biometric template, or a tracked physical key (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Credential purpose: the reason a credential exists (resident, work order, vendor, staff, guest or delivery, tour), which sets how long it is valid and the event that revokes it; no credential without a purpose record (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Credentialing (vendor compliance): proof before a vendor works that it is insured, licensed for the trade, a legitimate business with a taxpayer ID and, for entry into occupied homes, that its workers are screened; a vendor is compliant for a property, not in general, and the check repeats as documents expire (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Data-on-card lock: an offline lock that learns about grants and revocations only when a credential carrying fresh data touches a reader, which is why revocation can lag (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Duplicate detection (invoices): catching the same invoice arriving by email and by portal (a unique vendor and invoice number) or resubmitted under a new number (fuzzy matching on amount, date and property) (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Emergency (maintenance): a threat to life, safety or the building, such as fire, gas, flooding, no heat in cold weather, no water, a door that won't lock or a sewage backup; the emergency list is configuration per portfolio and routes to a human before any model reasons about it (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Entry notice: the notice state law requires before a landlord enters a home (minimum notice, form, hours, whether a service request counts as consent), modeled as an effective-dated rule plus a record of each notice served, with emergency entries recorded with their justification (Maintenance & Work Orders).
GPO (group purchasing organization): an organization that aggregates many buyers' volume to negotiate prices from national suppliers, funded by supplier fees or rebates on members' purchases (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Habitability (implied warranty of habitability): the duty, read into residential leases in most US jurisdictions, to keep a home safe and fit to live in, measured largely by the housing code; a breach can excuse rent in whole or part (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Inspection: a run of a versioned template (areas, items, rating scales, required photos) for move-in and move-out, annual, preventive, lender, insurer, code or due-diligence reasons; deficient findings create work orders, the work is done offline, and photos are evidence (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Make-ready board: the standard view of turns, showing each unit's stage and its next blocker (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Make-ready (turn): the work that takes a unit from the day the last household leaves to the day it's ready for the next (move-out inspection, trash-out, repairs, paint, flooring, cleaning, final inspection), scheduled backward from the next move-in with ordered, dependent tasks (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Managed catalog: a procurement catalog that restricts staff to approved items at contract prices (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Merchant of record (resident services): whoever sells a resident service: usually the provider, which charges the resident directly; if the operator collects, the charge is on the lease ledger and the operator is responsible for it (Resident Experience).
Package locker, package room: a locker bank or room where a carrier or staff member scans a package in, the household is notified and pickup is recorded; packages are matched to a household rather than a name string and held for a policy-set period (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Parking permit: a vehicle registered to a household for a period for unassigned parking, sometimes limited per unit or with guest passes; vehicles belong to households and permits to leases (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Payer of record: the legal entity recorded as making a vendor payment, whose name and TIN go on the 1099 (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Payment hold: a hold, with a reason, on paying a vendor whose compliance has lapsed, released when the missing document arrives; checked at work order or PO issue, invoice approval and payment release (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Payment run: a batch of approved bills paid out, grouped by paying entity and bank account so one owner's money never pays another owner's bills (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Permission to enter: the resident's answer at intake on whether staff may enter for a request, captured with pets and availability; where it's no or missing, entry notice rules apply (Maintenance & Work Orders).
PM (preventive maintenance): recurring work generated from a schedule attached to an asset, a building or a property (filter changes, detector tests, water heater flushes, code-required inspections), with building-wide in-unit work generating one work order and one entry notice per unit (Maintenance & Work Orders).
PO (purchase order): the operator's commitment to buy (vendor, property, priced lines, GL coding, and the work order or project it serves), issued for one property so the paying entity is known, and the thing an invoice is matched against (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Portal (resident portal, resident app): a client for records the platform already has (account, requests, lease, household, access, coverage, community, amenities, moving), with permissions derived from the person's current lease member roles on every request (Resident Experience).
Priority (work order): emergency, urgent or routine; urgent work makes part of the home unusable, and categories map to priorities through the operator's policy, checked against the law (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Procure-to-pay (P2P, source-to-pay): the chain from requisition through purchase order, receipt, invoice matching and approval to payment, sold whole by the suites and link by link by specialists (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Punchout: the catalog integration in which the buyer leaves the procurement system for the supplier's catalog site, fills a cart, and the cart returns as a requisition with prices and part numbers, using a protocol such as cXML (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Rebate: money returned on virtual card spending or GPO purchases, earned on spending the owner funded; whether the manager keeps, credits or shares it is a management agreement term, so each rebate is recorded by the property and bill that earned it (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Receipt: the recorded fact that goods arrived (what and how much) or, for services, completion of the linked work order; the third leg of a three-way match (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
Rekeying: changing locks between households or on request, required by law in some states with a deadline from a start event; whether reissuing an electronic credential satisfies a statute written for keyed locks is a question for legal review (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Repair deadline: a statutory, code or program clock for correcting a condition, keyed by category and severity and by its trigger (the tenant's written notice, service of a violation, an inspection), stored on the work order as respond_by and complete_by with the rule that set them (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Request channel: how a resident reached the operator with a request (portal, app, text, phone, email, walk-in), recorded because it decides whether the request counts as written notice for repair deadlines; a portal or app request is treated as written notice (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Resident services: things a resident buys at home (cleaning, handyman work, dog walking, internet and utility setup, moving help), where the platform records the merchant, who funds any credit, what the operator earns and the provider's own access grant (Resident Experience).
Retaliation: acting against a tenant for a protected act such as a repair notice or habitability complaint, which many states prohibit; retention signals may prioritize outreach and service, never a worse offer or a non-renewal (Resident Experience).
Retention signal: evidence from a household's service history and stated feedback (reopened work orders, slow responses, negative survey answers, unanswered messages) that tells a manager whom to call before the renewal window opens; never drawn from protected characteristics, and always explainable (Resident Experience).
Revocation sync: confirming that a revoked credential has actually reached the vendor cloud and the locks; each credential's sync state (pending, active, revoke pending, revoked, failed) is tracked, failures are retried, and a unit can't be marked ready while a prior-lease credential is unconfirmed (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Sentiment: a model's inferred label on residents' messages or feedback, stored with its model version and kept separate from what residents stated in surveys, and out of decisions the resident can't see or contest (Resident Experience).
Smart access law: a law regulating keyless entry data, such as New York City's Tenant Data Privacy Act (Local Law 63 of 2021): express consent, data minimization, limited uses, no location tracking outside the building, no use to harass or evict, and destruction of authentication data on a deadline (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Smart devices: in-unit and common-area thermostats, leak sensors, hubs, lighting, submeters, parking sensors and cameras; their alerts become work orders, vacant units are managed remotely, and device health is maintenance (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Survey (resident): a check-in triggered by events (after move-in, after a work order closes, before renewal, at move-out), tied to its subject so a bad answer feeds vendor scorecards and reopens or escalates the request (Resident Experience).
Tow request: the record of a vehicle removal: the vehicle, grounds, when and by whom it was first seen, any notice served, the authorizing user, police notification and towing company, with the rule evaluation that permitted it (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
Triage: setting a request's category, priority and who does the work (site staff or an outside vendor), and merging duplicate reports of one root cause under one work order (Maintenance & Work Orders).
Two-way match, three-way match: comparing an invoice with its purchase order (vendor, items, prices), and additionally with the receipt or completed work order; invoices within tolerance pass and others go to an exception queue (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
White-label app: a resident app carrying the operator's name, which keeps the resident relationship with the operator rather than building the vendor's audience (Resident Experience).