Flowstate words explained

New to Flowstate? This page explains the words you'll see on screen. If you're used to a different word, such as "timesheet", look in the You might say column.

People and teams

In Flowstate	What it means	You might say
Employee	Someone on your payroll. Their salary history decides what they cost. See Employees.	Staff, headcount
Contractor	Someone you pay a rate to, as a person or through a company. See Contractors.	Freelancer, supplier
Vacancy	A role you plan to hire. It's in the forecast before anyone joins. A cancelled vacancy costs nothing. See Vacancies.	Open role, req, position
Team	A group of people with a manager. Teams drive budgets and cost reporting. See Teams.	Squad, pod
Functional group	Your functional structure, such as areas, streams and domains, with positions people fill. It's separate from teams. See Functional groups.	Org chart, org structure
Position	A seat in a functional group that people fill for dated periods.	Role, slot
FTE	Full-time equivalent: a share of someone's time. 1.0 is one full-time person; 0.5 is half their time.	Capacity, allocation
Allocation	Who is planned on which team or project, from when, and for how much of their time. See Allocations.	Assignment, resourcing

Planning and budgets

In Flowstate	What it means	You might say
Live data	Your organisation as it is today. Every screen shows it unless you're in a scenario. See Live data and scenarios.	The plan, the actuals
Scenario	A private copy of the plan where you try changes without touching live data. Changes only become real when someone merges them. See Scenarios.	What-if, sandbox, draft
Merge	Applying a scenario's changes to live data.	Publish, go live
Forecast	What your people, contractors and planned hires are expected to cost, month by month. See Read and export the forecast.	Run rate, burn, headcount cost
Budget	A saved copy of the forecast for a fiscal year that you track against. See Budgets.	Envelope, the approved number
Budget run	Asking team managers to plan their team's budget, approving each one, and accepting the result. See Start a budget run.	Budget cycle, budget exercise
Base plan	The starting point every team's budget is built on during a budget run.	Baseline, reference scenario

Projects and work

In Flowstate	What it means	You might say
Project	A piece of delivery work, usually linked to a project in Jira, Linear or Azure DevOps. Effort and cost land on projects. See Manage projects.	Epic, workstream, business case
Initiative	A group of projects you report on together. See Group projects into initiatives.	Programme, theme
Cost centre	The finance bucket a project's cost goes to. Its category (CapEx, OpEx or R&D) decides how the cost is treated. See Set up your organisation basics.	Cost code

Effort reporting

In Flowstate	What it means	You might say
Effort	The share of each day someone spent on each project. It's always a share of the day, never hours.	Time, time allocation
Effort report or week	Your team's week of effort. Flowstate drafts it from your tools; the team lead checks it and submits it. See Review and submit your team's week.	Timesheet, sign-off
Flowstate estimate	The effort Flowstate worked out from ticket activity and code.	The draft
Team lead's version	The week as the team lead submitted it, with their changes.	The signed-off week
Unattributed	Work Flowstate spotted but couldn't tie to a project. Sort it before you submit. See Fix unattributed effort.	Other, unallocated
Non-project work	Time you or a lead choose to put outside any project. Flowstate never fills this in itself.	BAU, admin, meetings

Finance

In Flowstate	What it means	You might say
CapEx	Cost you capitalise: work that builds an asset. Your accounting policy decides what qualifies. See How capitalisation works.	Capex, capitalisable
OpEx	Cost you expense in the year, such as maintenance and bug fixing.	Opex, run cost
Uncategorised	Cost Flowstate can't place as CapEx or OpEx yet, usually because its project has no cost centre.	Unknown
Post-completion cost centre	Where a project's cost goes after its end date. It counts as OpEx.	After-launch cost
Justification (rationale)	The written case for capitalising a project. Flowstate drafts it; the project owner checks and submits it. See Write and submit a justification.	Write-up, capitalisation memo
R&D claim	A claim for R&D tax relief built from your projects' effort and evidence. See R&D tax claims.	R&D tax credit

AI

In Flowstate	What it means	You might say
AI spend	What you pay AI providers, by person, team and tool. See Agent insights.	Token spend, credits
AI session	One conversation someone had with an AI tool, tied to their work where Flowstate can. See Review AI sessions.	Prompts, usage
Copilot	An AI tool your people use, such as Claude, Cursor or GitHub Copilot. See Copilots.	AI seat, AI tool
Agent	An AI worker you plan for alongside people, with an owner. See Agents.	Bot, automation
Cloud Proxy	The service that records AI sessions from people's Macs so they can be tied to work. See About the Cloud Proxy.	Proxy