Core concepts

A short glossary of the words you meet in finstory, defined the way the product uses them.

Workspace and people

Term	What it means
Workspace	One company’s or group’s space in finstory, with its own data models, reports, stories, members and settings.
Member	A person who can open a workspace.
Role	What a member may do: User, Editor, Power user or Admin. See Workspace administration.
Reeve	The AI assistant built into finstory. It answers questions about your figures and helps build reports and stories.

Data

Term	What it means
Model (data model)	Holds the structure, calculations and data for one part of the business. Every workspace starts with one model; you can add more. A report always belongs to one model.
Dimension	One way of looking at your figures, such as by entity, by account or by period.
Member (of a dimension)	One item in a dimension, such as one account or one entity. Members can have children; a parent shows the total of its children.
Entity	The companies or business units you report on.
Account	The lines of your statements, such as Revenue. Each account has an Account Type (Revenue, Expense, Asset, Liability, Equity or Balance) and an Aggregation Sign that says whether it adds to, subtracts from or is ignored in its parent.
Period and Year	The periods of your calendar, such as months, and the year they belong to. You pick them separately. All models in a workspace share one period calendar.
Category	finstory’s name for a scenario, such as Actual, Budget or Forecast. A new model starts with Actual.
View	How a figure reads over time, for example Periodic (the period on its own) or YTD (year to date).
Currency	The currency a figure was loaded in. You can filter or group by it. finstory does not convert between currencies.
Measure	A dimension for calculations that belong to no other dimension, such as a ratio. It always has a built-in member called Default.
Custom dimension	An extra dimension with a name your workspace chooses, such as Department or Product. A model can use up to eight.
Calculated member	A member whose value comes from a formula instead of loaded data, such as a margin percentage or a variance.
Shared member	An account or entity that also appears under a second parent. It gives you an alternative roll-up without loading the data twice.
Connection	A link to a source system, such as your accounting system, that loads figures into a model.

Reports and stories

Term	What it means
Report	A page of tables, charts and tiles built on one model. A report is either published, so every member can open it, or a draft.
Group	A named section of the Reports menu that holds reports.
Selectors	The dropdowns under a report’s title, such as Entity, Year and Period. They set what the whole report shows. The report editor calls them the POV (point of view).
Component	A building block of a report: Table, Pie Chart, Bar/Line, Waterfall, Funnel, Tile, Scale or Nested Row.
List	The items a component shows as its rows or columns, such as a set of accounts. A list is either fixed (you choose the items) or dynamic (it follows the hierarchy, for example all children of a member).
KPI	A headline figure. In a report it is shown on a Tile, which can also show a variance, a small trend line, a gauge, a rank or a bridge.
Story	A scrolling narrative that explains your figures chapter by chapter, with charts and commentary. A story is private or public.
Chapter	One section of a story. A chapter moves through one or more steps as you scroll.
Basis	A switch in a story that shows what each step rests on: data, an answer someone gave, or an assumption.

How the pieces fit together

Figures are loaded into a model, by upload or through a connection. A report reads the model and shows the figures for the selectors you choose. A story explains those figures in chapters.