Glossary

A scaffold inspection is the examination of a scaffold by a competent person before first use, after alteration or any event that could affect its stability, and at intervals of no more than seven days, with a written report. It is separate from the visual check users make before climbing on each day.

A schedule of condition is a dated factual record, written and photographic, of the state of a building at a fixed moment, normally the start of a commercial lease. Annexed to the lease and referred to in the repairing covenant, it limits the tenant to leaving the property in no worse condition than the record shows.

Scheduling optimisation is the use of algorithms to assign and sequence field jobs across a workforce so that travel, overtime and missed commitments are minimised, while skills, parts, appointment windows and working hours are all respected. It replaces the manual board with a scored, repeatable plan.

Screen recapture is the act of pointing a camera at a display and recording what is shown on it, so an existing image or video can be submitted as though it were captured live. It needs no software, no drivers and no technical skill, which is exactly what makes it durable.

A screen recording is a video of whatever is showing on a computer screen, narrated by the person recording it and usually with a small camera window showing their face. Dealership sales and BDC teams use it to show a stock list, a finance quote or a service estimate instead of describing it on the phone.

A sealed submission is a package of evidence, the files, the answers and the session record, bound together and cryptographically signed at the moment the receiving system takes delivery, so anyone can verify later that the package is complete and unaltered since receipt.

Second line support is the specialist tier that handles what first line cannot resolve: cases with no documented fix, cases needing elevated access or a system-level change, and cases where the cause has to be investigated rather than looked up. Ownership of the customer normally stays at first line.

A second opinion inspection is a fresh inspection of the same asset by a different qualified inspector, carried out to test the first inspector's conclusion. It is usually triggered by a dispute, a high-value decision, or a result that looks out of line with expectation.

A security deposit is money an operator takes or blocks at the start of a rental or hire as protection against unpaid charges, fines, and damage. In vehicle rental it is usually a card pre-authorisation rather than a payment, and it is released once the account is settled.

Self certification is an arrangement in which the party that carried out the work attests that the work meets the required standard, instead of an independent inspector checking it. It is fast, cheap and very widespread, and it puts the check in the hands of the party with the most to gain from a pass.

Self-service claims is the model in which the policyholder reports a loss and supplies the supporting evidence themselves, through a web page, portal or link, without a call to a handler or a visit from an assessor. The insurer reviews what arrives and decides.

Self service inspection is any inspection in which the person already at the location completes it unaccompanied, with no inspector, adjuster or engineer attending in person or watching live. The organisation sends the request, and whoever is there does the capturing.

A self-service portal is a customer-facing web area where people check status, complete routine tasks and find answers without contacting an agent, usually combining an account view, a knowledge base and a set of transactional actions. Most portals handle the start of an issue well and the end of it badly.

Send rate is the share of eligible opportunities that actually receive a video, and the share of licensed reps who send at least one in a given period. It is the adoption metric behind every other video number, because nothing downstream can happen on a video that was never sent.

A serial number is a unique identifier assigned to one individual unit of a product, distinguishing it from every other unit of the same model. It is the key that links a physical item to its build date, specification, warranty entitlement and service history. One unit, one number, never reused.

Service absorption is the share of a dealership's adjusted overhead covered by the gross profit of the fixed departments alone, service, parts and body shop. It answers one question for a dealer principal: if the showroom sold nothing this month, how much of the building would still be paid for?

A service advisor is the link between customer and workshop: takes the car in, writes the repair order, gets approvals, hands back. Duties, skills, typical day.

Service advisor training is the structured coaching that teaches dealership service advisors how to run a write-up, present inspection findings, explain recommended work in language a customer accepts, and follow up on the jobs that get declined. It is the main lever on approval rates.

Service capacity is the number of productive labour hours a dealership workshop can actually sell in a given period, calculated from the technicians on strength and the hours each realistically clocks onto jobs. It is measured in hours, never in bays, ramps or bookings.

A service contract is an agreement to maintain and repair an asset over a defined period for an agreed fee, instead of charging for each job as it arises. The customer buys availability and a response commitment. The provider takes on the risk of how much work that turns out to be.

A service desk is the single point of contact between a service provider and its users, responsible for capturing every incident, request and question that comes in, resolving what it can at first contact, and routing the rest to the right specialist. ITIL 4 defines it as a practice, not a team.

The service drive is the covered lane where customers hand their vehicles over at a dealership, and the point in the aftersales process where an advisor greets the car, writes the repair order and agrees what will be looked at. Everything the workshop earns that day is decided there.

The service lane is the covered drive-in area of a dealership where customers arrive for service, meet the advisor and have the vehicle walked around, checked in and written up before it goes to the workshop. The name is also used for the software that runs that check-in process.

A service loaner is a vehicle a dealership lends a customer at no charge while their own car is in the workshop, drawn from a fleet the dealership owns or leases for that purpose. It is a capacity asset carrying a daily cost, not a courtesy gesture.

A service menu is the fixed list of maintenance jobs a dealership sells, with each job defined in advance by its operation content, labour time and price. It lets the advisor present a set choice at the write-up instead of building a quote from scratch on every car.

Service recovery is what an organisation does after it has failed a customer: acknowledging the failure quickly, fixing it, compensating in proportion where that is warranted, and changing the process that caused it. It is a defined operational practice, not an apology.

A service reminder is a scheduled message prompting a vehicle owner to book work that is due: a routine service, an annual test, an outstanding recall, or a repair they turned down at an earlier visit. It is the main tool a workshop has for filling its own diary rather than waiting for the phone.

A service report is the record a technician produces at the end of a visit, covering what was found, what was done, which parts and labour were used, and the condition the asset was left in. It is written for the customer and for the file somebody reads months later.

Service retention is the share of a dealership's customers who come back to that dealership for service inside a defined window, usually measured against vehicles it sold. It is the metric most sensitive to definition, because the window and the denominator can move the same store's result by twenty points.

A severity rating is a scored judgement of how serious a defect is, placed on a defined scale so the same fault, recorded by different people on different days, lands in the same band and triggers the same response. It ranks consequence, not likelihood.

A shallowfake is a real photo, video or document that has been altered with ordinary editing tools such as a phone photo app, Photoshop or a free web editor. No AI is involved: the original file is genuine, and something in it has been added, removed or swapped.

A shared inbox is a team workspace where incoming work arrives in one queue and each item can be assigned an owner, given a status and tracked to completion, rather than sitting in an individual's personal mailbox. The queue, not the person, holds the work.

A shop foreman is the senior technician who runs the workshop floor: the person junior technicians call when a diagnosis stalls, who checks quality before a car leaves, and who decides whether a job needs to move to someone else. It is a technical leadership role, not a departmental management one.

Showroom traffic is the count of customer visits to a dealership sales floor in a given period, and the base number most sales metrics are divided by. Managers use it to work out closing ratio, plan staffing per shift, and separate a traffic problem from a selling problem.

A sight unseen sale is a vehicle sale agreed without the buyer physically inspecting the car first. The deal is done from photographs, video, a written description and a condition report, with delivery or collection happening only after the paperwork is signed.

A site acceptance test (SAT) is the formal test of a machine, line or system after delivery and installation at the buyer's site, run against an agreed protocol to confirm it performs as specified in its real environment. Passing the SAT usually triggers final payment, the start of the warranty and the handover of responsibility to the buyer.

A site survey is a structured check of a physical location carried out before work is scheduled, recording access, dimensions, existing services, conditions and hazards so that the job can be quoted, resourced and planned accurately. It answers what is actually there, before anyone commits to a date.

Site verification is the check that confirms a business, project or operation actually exists and functions at its stated address. Lenders, payment providers, insurers and franchisors use it during onboarding and underwriting, because documents prove paperwork and a site check proves a place.

An SIU, or Special Investigation Unit, is the team inside an insurer that investigates claims and applications suspected of fraud. Handlers refer a file when indicators appear, and the unit gathers evidence so a decision can be made on facts rather than suspicion.

A service level agreement is a contractual commitment defining the service a provider will deliver, how performance is measured, and what the customer receives when a commitment is missed. In field service an SLA usually fixes a response time, a resolution time, a coverage window and a remedy.

A snagging app is software used to record defects on a new-build or newly fitted property, one item at a time, each with a photo, a location, a description and a status, so the builder can put every item right and the buyer can see it closed. In the US it is called a punch list app.

A snagging inspection is the systematic check of a newly built or newly refurbished property for defects, unfinished work and departures from specification, carried out before or shortly after handover so the builder can put them right. The output is the snagging list; the inspection is the process that produces it.

A snagging list is the itemised record of defects, unfinished items and departures from specification found when near-complete construction or installation work is inspected, written up so each item can be put right and signed off. In the US and Canada the same document is called a punch list.

Sold hours are the labour hours a workshop invoices, whether to a retail customer, a manufacturer under warranty or an internal department. They are the book or menu time for the job, not the time the technician actually took, and they are the numerator in most workshop performance ratios.

A sold order is a vehicle a dealership has sold to a named customer but has not yet delivered, because it is still being built, still in transit, or still waiting on preparation. It is a committed unit and a live customer relationship, sitting in the gap between the signature and the keys.

Sold out of trust, often shortened to SOT, is when a dealer sells a vehicle financed on a floorplan line but does not pay the lender off within the agreed window, using the sale proceeds for something else instead. The lender's collateral is gone, the debt remains, and in most agreements it is an immediate event of default.

Spare parts identification is the process of determining exactly which replacement part fits one specific unit, using the serial number, the build variant and the manufacturer's parts catalogue. It replaces guesswork from a description of what the broken part looks like. Get it wrong and you ship twice.

A spot check is an unannounced inspection of a small number of items drawn from a larger population, used to test whether the routine process is working. It is triggered by suspicion or by a sampling plan rather than by an event or a date in the calendar.

An SRP, or search results page, is the filtered inventory listing a shopper sees before choosing a car, showing many vehicles as tiles with a thumbnail, price and headline spec. It is the page that decides which of your units gets looked at properly.

A staged accident is a collision deliberately arranged by the people taking part so that an insurance claim can be made, with every vehicle and occupant under the fraudsters' control. That last point separates it from an induced accident, where a genuine innocent motorist is manoeuvred into the crash.

Status tracking is the practice of recording which stage each item of work has reached in a defined sequence, and displaying it so the state of the queue, and of any single case within it, can be read directly rather than reconstructed by asking people.

A statutory inspection is an inspection or examination of equipment that UK law requires, at a set interval or trigger, by a competent person, with a written record. The main regulations are LOLER for lifting equipment, PUWER for work equipment, PSSR for pressure systems and the Electricity at Work Regulations for electrical systems.

A stock condition survey is a structured visual inspection of a social landlord's homes that records the condition and remaining life of each building component, checks compliance with the Decent Homes Standard and hazard ratings, and feeds the long-term investment plan. Most landlords aim to survey every home within a five-year cycle.

Straight through processing, or STP, is the handling of a claim from notification to payment entirely by automated rules, with no manual intervention by a handler. A claim either qualifies at intake and flows through, or it falls out into a manual queue for a person to work.

Speech to text (STT) is the automated conversion of spoken audio into written words, producing a machine-readable transcript that can be searched, quoted, and stored next to the recording it came from. Accuracy is reported as word error rate.

A subdomain is a domain name that sits one level below a parent domain, created by adding a label to the left of it, so support.example.com is a subdomain of example.com. To DNS it is simply a longer name, resolved the same way as any other.

Subrogation is the right of an insurer that has paid a claim to step into the policyholder's legal position and recover that payment from whoever caused the loss. The insured's rights against the responsible party transfer to the insurer, up to the amount it paid out.

Support triage is the practice of assessing every contact arriving at a support desk and deciding, before any work begins, how urgent it is, how much it affects, and which skill it needs. The output of triage is a priority and an owner, never a solution.

Synthetic media is content generated or substantially altered by artificial intelligence rather than recorded from the real world: images, video, audio and documents with no genuine original behind them. In claims, it is the umbrella term that deepfakes and AI-generated damage photos sit inside.

Tamper evident describes a control that makes alteration of a record or a container detectable after the fact rather than impossible, so anyone who checks can tell whether something changed, even though nothing physically stopped the change from being made.

Technician efficiency is the labour hours a technician sells divided by the hours that technician actually clocks onto jobs, shown as a percentage, and it measures one thing only: how fast the work gets done against the published flat-rate time. It routinely runs above 100%, and it should.

Technician levels are the graded ladder a workshop uses to classify its technicians by proven skill, from apprentice through to master technician, with the grade deciding which jobs a technician is allocated and what they are paid. The frameworks behind the grades differ by country.

Technician utilisation is the share of a technician's available paid hours that are booked to customer work, calculated as billable or job hours divided by total available hours. It measures how full the diary is, not how much of that booked time was actually spent working on the asset.

A tenancy deposit is money a tenant pays a landlord or letting agent at the start of a tenancy as security against unpaid rent, damage or cleaning costs. In England and Wales it must be held in a government-approved protection scheme and returned in full at the end unless the landlord can evidence a deduction.

A tenant inspection app is a tool that lets the tenant, rather than an agent or inventory clerk, record the condition of a property on their own phone at check-in, mid-tenancy or check-out. The landlord or agent sets what has to be photographed, and the tenant's submission becomes the dated condition record.

A test drive is a supervised or unsupervised drive of a vehicle by a prospective buyer before purchase, run by a dealership under its motor trade insurance and after a licence check. It is also called a demo or a demonstration drive, and it is the single strongest predictor of a sale on the floor.

A thermographic inspection uses an infrared camera to map the thermal radiation leaving a surface, so that a condition beneath or behind that surface can be inferred from the pattern. It measures surface temperature. It does not see through anything.

A third party claim is a claim brought by someone outside the policy against the insurer of the person who caused their loss, so claimant and paying insurer have no contract. Liability has to be established before the value of the loss is settled.

A third party lead is a sales enquiry a dealership buys from an independent marketplace or lead aggregator, where the shopper submitted their details on someone else's website. The dealer pays per lead or by monthly subscription, and the same enquiry is often sold to competing dealers as well.

A thorough examination is the systematic and detailed examination of lifting equipment by a competent person, required under Regulation 9 of the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998. It produces a written report, not a certificate, and is distinct from both routine inspection and servicing.

What a video thumbnail is, why it decides whether your video gets played, and how to pick a frame that earns the click in emails and messages.

Ticket deflection is the practice of answering a customer's question through self-service so that no support ticket is created, together with the metric that counts how often that happens. The metric is measured as an absence, which is what makes it so easy to report and so easy to fake.

A timestamp is a recorded value stating when a particular system observed a particular event, and its evidential weight depends entirely on which clock set it: a device clock the participant controls, a server clock the receiving organisation controls, or an independent third-party clock.

A timestamped photo is a photograph that carries a record of when it was taken, either printed on the image, stored in its metadata, or logged by the system that received it. As evidence, its value depends on which clock set the time and whether the file has changed since.

A total loss is a claim that an insurer settles by paying out the pre-loss value of the damaged item instead of paying for it to be repaired. The test is economic rather than mechanical: most written-off vehicles could physically be rebuilt, the cost has simply passed the point where rebuilding makes sense.

A touchless claim is a claim settled without a human visiting the loss. In the stricter sense used by insurers, it is a claim handled from notification to payment without a handler touching it at all, with the policyholder's own submitted evidence and automated rules doing the work a person used to do.

A third party administrator, or TPA, is a company that handles claims and related administration on behalf of an organisation that carries the risk, such as an insurer, a self-insured employer or a scheme. A TPA is paid a fee to administer, and never carries the risk itself.

A trade-in appraisal is the value a dealership puts on a customer's vehicle when that vehicle is offered as part payment against another car, built from a condition assessment plus current market data. It is vehicle appraisal applied to one specific moment: a car being used to buy a car.

Transcription is the conversion of recorded speech into written text, stored alongside the recording so the spoken part of a submission can be read, searched and quoted instead of replayed in full. It is also called speech to text, or ASR.

A truck roll is a single dispatch of a technician and a service vehicle to a customer site to diagnose, repair or install something. Field service teams count truck rolls as a unit of cost, because every trip spends fuel, drive time and a slot on the schedule.

An underbody inspection is a structured examination of the underside of a vehicle or machine, covering chassis, suspension, brake and fuel lines, exhaust, driveline and corrosion, carried out from an inspection pit, on a vehicle lift, or with the asset raised and supported on stands.

Unit sales is the count of vehicles a dealership delivers in a period, measured in vehicles rather than revenue. It is the volume half of dealership profit, multiplied by gross profit per unit to give total gross, and it is counted differently depending on what is included.

Upload versus capture is the distinction between two ways visual material reaches an organisation: an upload lets the sender choose an existing file from their device, while a live capture records inside the requested session itself and closes most of the window between recording and submission.

Upsell rate is the percentage of recommended additional work that a service department gets approved by the customer, measured either as approved items against every item recommended, or as the share of repair orders carrying at least one extra. The two methods give different answers from the same month.

A used car inspection is a structured condition check of a used vehicle against a defined checklist, recording identity, mileage, mechanical condition, safety items, bodywork and interior. It establishes what state a car is in, without saying anything about what it is worth.

Van stock is the set of parts and consumables an engineer carries in the service vehicle. Also called truck stock, trunk stock or boot stock, it is the only inventory that exists at the moment a job is being worked, which makes it the stock level that decides whether the job closes.

A vehicle condition report, usually shortened to VCR, is a structured record of a vehicle's physical and mechanical state at one point in time: panel by panel, with photographs, declared damage and often a numeric grade. It is the document every sight-unseen vehicle transaction is priced against.

A VDP, or vehicle detail page, is the page dedicated to one specific vehicle in stock, carrying its photos, video, price, specification, history and enquiry options. It is the page where a shopper stops browsing the lot and starts considering a single car.

A vehicle appraisal is a formal assessment of what a vehicle is worth at a given moment, based on its identity, specification, mileage, condition and the live market for that exact unit. It is the general act of valuing a car, whatever the reason the valuation is needed.

Vehicle delivery is the event at which a sold vehicle physically passes to its buyer: the day the car is signed for and the keys change hands. It is the point where a sold order becomes a delivered unit, and it is not the same thing as the handover that happens inside it.

A vehicle history report is a VIN-keyed summary of what has been officially recorded about one specific vehicle: title brands, reported odometer readings, ownership changes, and logged incidents. It shows what was reported to a database, which is not the same as everything that happened to the car.

Vehicle merchandising is how a dealership presents a specific unit online: the photo set, the written description, the video, the price and the specification on its listing. It is the digital equivalent of how a car used to be prepped and positioned on the front line.

A vehicle self-inspection app is a tool that lets the driver, customer or policyholder record the condition or damage of a vehicle on their own phone, following a shot list the organisation set. The submission replaces or precedes a visit by an inspector, appraiser or assessor.

A vehicle walkaround is a filmed or in-person circuit of a car in which every panel, tyre, interior surface and warning light is shown and described in a fixed order, so the person who cannot stand next to the vehicle can still see its condition. Dealerships use it in sales presentations and in service documentation.

Vertical video is video shot and shown in a portrait frame, taller than it is wide, most commonly at a 9:16 aspect ratio, the shape a phone produces when it is held upright. It fills the whole screen of a phone held the same way, with no black bars.

VHC stands for Vehicle Health Check: the inspection a workshop does during a service, reported as red, amber or green. What is checked and why it matters.

Video analytics is the measurement layer around a video: who opened it, how far they watched, what they clicked, and what happened next. In a dealership it covers both published marketing video and the one-to-one videos reps and advisors send to individual customers.