Glossary

While we’ve tried to make as much of the Invopop API as intuitive as possible, this brief glossary should help clarify what we mean when using certain words about the platform.

Term	Description
Company	Every user of Invopop has a company that they are associated with. Practically all API operations will be associated with a company.
Document	While this term may be used in a general context to refer to PDFs or JSON documents, in invopop we typically use this term to refer to a GOBL Envelope Document. This typically implies we’re referring to an Invoice, Message, or some other key GOBL Document schema.
Envelope	More accurately, a “GOBL Envelope” is a wrapper around a document payload that adds a header and set of digital signatures. See the gobl documentation for more details.
GOBL	Stands for “Go Business Language” and is the library and schema we created in order to simplify the creation of electronic invoices and other structured documents using JSON as the primary representation format. For more details, so the gobl.org site.
Integration	Defines a name and optional configuration for an integration with a provider that will perform a specific task with your GOBL Envelopes.
Intent	These represent the link between a job and a specific connector that needs to be executed. They contain a list of events tracking the execution process.
Job	A job represents the link between an Envelope and a Workflow. It contains an Intent for each of the integrations that have been executed.
Position	Every user has a “position” inside a company.
Provider	Not normally referred to by the API, but worth mentioning due to their importance to Invopop. A Provider is the name we’ve given to the service that is used to execute a task. Some providers are global, most are region specific.
Region	Typically the country or potentially state where a company is fiscally registered. It determines the rules that will be applied to a GOBL Document, and which providers and thus tasks will be available for the company.
Sequence	Refers to the service that is responsible for managing sequences, sequential codes that are guaranteed to be ordered and suitable to be included in legal documents.
Series	Part of the sequence service, a series contains a definition that defines prefixes, indexes, and suffixes used to generate sequential codes.
Silo	Our name for the GOBL Envelope storage service. (We like this name because it’s short). It’s also responsible for persisting attachments with envelopes, such as PDFs generated by task.
Token	This is the code used to authenticate requests to the Invopop API. These should be kept in a secure and secret location!
Transform	This service is responsible for executing jobs using the defined workflow and it’s integrations. Sometimes this will be called the “Transform Engine”.
User	Used to grant access to a company, it’ll link an email address with a person. A user may have multiple positions at different companies.
Workflow	A key component of the Transform engine. The Workflow defines a set of integrations that should be executed by a job.