Glossary

Plain-language definitions of the terms you’ll meet across KeyOne. Skim it once, refer back as needed. About 6 minutes.

KeyOne borrows vocabulary from retail, analytics, and its own way of working. Here’s what each term means in practice.

Core concepts

SKU × Store × Day The lowest grain KeyOne holds data at — every SKU, in every Store, on every Day. Almost every metric is computed from this base and rolled up. Because the data lives at this grain, you can always drill from a national number down to one product in one store on one date. (See Connecting Your Data.)

SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) A single, distinct sellable product variant — a specific size, flavour, or pack of a brand. “500ml Cola” and “2L Cola” are different SKUs.

Principal The brand owner — the FMCG company whose products sell through retailers. KeyOne is built for principals. Each principal is an isolated tenant.

Tenant An isolated workspace and dataset belonging to one principal. Your data is yours; tenants don’t see each other’s data.

Decisions & work

Decision Something the engine has found that needs a person: a gap, an exposure, or an opportunity, raised against a specific outlet, product or territory by a definition — a rule over your own data. Each carries a severity, a status, the hub it belongs to and, where the rule can measure one, a value impact. A decision is closed by the data — when the rule stops returning it — never by someone marking it done.

Decisions The ranked list of open decisions, at /app/decisions. Filter by hub, severity, status, definition, region or channel. Every hub also carries the decisions raised in its own area.

Value impact The number on a decision, in the unit its definition declares — money, days, checks, units or a proportion. Only money is called value at risk, and only money is ever added into a total. (See Understanding a Decision’s Value.)

Recording a decision What a person does about a card: Act (we are doing something about this), Defer (not yet — and until when), or Dismiss (not acting on this recurrence, with a reason). Each is stored as a judgement with the reason given; none of them closes the card, because only the data can say the problem is gone.

Assign / Snooze Assign puts a card in a colleague’s queue and, optionally, sets a due date. Snooze hides it until a date; if the data still returns it then, it comes back.

Related cards Links between decisions — is caused by, is a duplicate of, blocks — so an executive’s national gap and a rep’s in-store task are seen as one problem from different angles. Shown as Related cards on a decision’s detail page.

Task A KeyLink term: a decision as it appears in a field rep’s work feed, tied to the store where it is actioned. Reps see tasks in KeyLink.

Win List A KeyLink term, not an office one: the first sub-tab of a store visit, listing the prioritised actions for that store. There is no Win List on the desktop side — office users work from Decisions.

Verification loop The check that compares a treated store and SKU against untreated peers after an action, over a comparison window — 14 days by default, adjustable up to 180. It records a verdict only where there were enough comparable peers and enough data to reach one, and says which was missing when there were not.

Closed loop KeyOne’s core idea: a problem is detected → turned into a tracked action → executed → and the result measured, feeding back to sharpen the next recommendation.

DiagramDetect, decide, act, re-measure — then repeat

Retail metrics

Trade spend (TTS) — the investment you pay the trade to sell your product: promotional funding, listing fees, rebates and co-op advertising. Reported per customer, per outlet and per promotional event in the Trade Investment hub.

GSV (gross sales value) — what the sale would have been worth at list price, before any discount. Turnover is what you actually invoiced. Trade spend is quoted against both, and the gap between the two percentages is itself informative: a category whose ratios diverge is discounting on top of its trade spend.

Customer — the retail account, one level above the outlet. An account signs one trading agreement and takes one investment; its stores sell the product. Where a figure is only available per store, KeyOne says outlet rather than customer, because a rollup that does not exist should not be implied by a label.

Outlet — an individual store. Always the finer grain; a customer has many.

Days of cover — how long current stock lasts at the current rate of sale (stock on hand divided by units sold per day). Available at network, depot and store level; a store figure uses that store’s own rate of sale, because a case is three weeks of cover in a small outlet and two days in a large one.

Sell-in — what you shipped into the trade: the units an outlet or distributor ordered from you and actually received. It comes from your own ERP, and it is the number your invoices are built on.

Sell-out — what the trade sold on to consumers: units scanned through the till. It comes from the retailer, not from you.

They are not two views of the same number and they are not expected to match. The difference between them over a period is a change in the stock sitting in the trade — shipping 100 and selling 80 means 20 more cases in the trade, not a 20-case error. What matters is the direction over time: sell-in holding up while sell-out falls means stock is being pushed into a trade that is not selling it, which shows up later as returns, markdowns, or an outlet that stops ordering entirely.

Rate of sale (ROS) How fast a product sells — typically units sold per store per day across your range. The pulse of demand.

OSA (On-Shelf Availability) Of the stores where a product is listed, the percentage that actually have it on the shelf right now. High distribution with low OSA means you’re listed but out of stock where it counts.

Distribution The percentage of targeted stores that have your SKU listed / ranged. Answers “where are we present?” — as opposed to OSA’s “is it actually on the shelf?”

Share of shelf The percentage of linear shelf space occupied by your products in a category — a key signal of in-store presence, often read from shelf photos.

Category share How your products perform versus the whole category and competitors.

Void / void-fill A void is a gap where a product should be on shelf but isn’t; void-fill is the action of closing it.

Planogram compliance Whether a store’s shelf actually follows the approved layout (the planogram).

Revenue at risk An estimate of the weekly revenue impacted by current out-of-stocks and distribution gaps.

Surfaces & tools

Hub A focused analytics workspace for one commercial or operational area (Price & Promo, Availability, Trade Investment, etc.), with a narrative, KPI strip, charts, and a Decisions & Actions panel. (See Using a Hub.)

KeyChat The conversational analyst — ask questions in plain language, get grounded, cited answers. (See KeyChat.)

KeyLink The mobile field companion for reps — route, store visits, shelf audits, and task completion. (See KeyLink for Field Reps.)

Command palette The ⌘K search box that jumps you to any page or hub. (See Keyboard Shortcuts.)

Image recognition (IR) Turning shelf photos into structured data — gaps, share of shelf, compliance, competitor presence.

Honest note: image recognition is currently simulated — the capture, write-back, and task creation are real, but the part that identifies what’s in the photo is a placeholder, and results are labelled as simulated. (See KeyLink.)

Statuses you’ll see

On a decision

Severity — critical, high, medium, low — is set by the rule that raised the decision and shown as a badge; it is not a status and it does not change the order of the list.

On a campaign: draft → active → completed, or cancelled. Completed and cancelled are final.

On a KeyLink visit: planned → in progress → completed, or skipped. A planned visit whose date has passed shows as overdue on the Field Team roster.

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