Glossary

If a term in the product or in a Nova answer is unfamiliar, find it here. Terms are grouped by where you meet them.

Core Planning

Term	What it means
Budget version	A named container for one set of plan numbers, for example “2026 Budget” or “Rolling Forecast”. Every figure in the product belongs to a version, so you can hold many plans side by side.
Live version	The version you are actively editing. Most teams keep one live Rolling Forecast.
Locked version	A frozen snapshot that can no longer be edited, used as a stable reference (for example an approved budget).
Archived version	An old version kept for history, hidden from the main pickers.
Lock level	How much of a version is frozen. It ranges from locking only external-facing data up to locking everything, including assumptions and rules.
Actuals	What really happened, pulled from your GL and HRIS.
Budget	The plan you committed to at the start of the period.
Forecast	Your current best estimate, usually actuals for closed months plus a projection for the rest.
Scenario	A what-if variation on a base plan (for example a slower-hiring case) that you can compare without changing the base.
Dimension	An axis you slice numbers by: department, entity, account, product, channel, region, or period.
Base currency	The single currency every figure is translated into so totals are summable. Native amounts are converted using FX rates.

Term	What it means
Fully loaded cost	The true monthly cost of a person: base salary plus fringe, merit, bonus, commission, and recruiting fees.
Fringe	Benefits and payroll taxes loaded onto base salary as a rate.
Merit	A planned raise applied from a chosen effective month forward.
Open position	A planned hire, backfill, or removal that is not yet a real employee.
Backfill	Replacing someone who left. A position number keeps a stable identity for the seat, so a backfill does not count twice.
People snapshot	Your current team as synced from the HRIS, with optional overrides.
Override	A change to a person’s attribute (title, department, memo) that does not alter the source HR data.
FTE	Full-time equivalent. A half-time role is 0.5 FTE.
Direction-aware counting	Open positions count by intent: an add increases headcount, a remove decreases it, and an update changes cost without changing the count.

Term	What it means
ARR	Annual Recurring Revenue, the annualized value of active subscriptions.
CARR	Contracted ARR, the annualized value of signed contracts at their booking date, before they go live.
Live ARR	The portion of CARR that has activated and is now recognizing, after any onboarding or go-live delay.
Recognized revenue	The revenue posted to the P&L in a period, derived from the active ARR balance.
Stream	A type of revenue: subscription, one-time bookings, usage, marketplace, or other income. Each forecasts differently.
Cohort	A group of customers grouped by when they were acquired, used to study retention over time.
Activation curve	The schedule that spreads new CARR into Live ARR over the months after a deal closes.
NDR	Net Dollar Retention, revenue from a cohort this period versus a year ago, including expansion and churn.
GRR	Gross Dollar Retention, the same idea but excluding expansion, so it can never exceed 100 percent.
LTV	Lifetime Value, the total revenue a customer is expected to generate over their lifetime.
Pipeline weighting	Multiplying an open deal by its stage probability so the forecast reflects likelihood, not just the full amount.
Driver-based forecasting	Building revenue bottom up from levers like reps, quota, attainment, and churn rather than from a single number.
Renewal NDR	The retention assumption applied to a cohort when it renews.

Term	What it means
Variance	The difference between two figures, usually plan versus actual, shown in dollars and percent.
Waterfall (bridge)	A chart that walks from a starting balance to an ending balance through each driver, so you can see what moved the number.
Comparison	Putting any two versions side by side with the variance on every line.
Brief	A finished, executive-ready write-up of a variance with a waterfall, drivers, and drill-downs.
Metric	A defined, reusable number (a KPI) that the whole product computes the same way.
Pivot	Reshaping a table so a dimension becomes columns, for example months across the top.

Term	What it means
Connector	A live link to a source system such as HiBob, NetSuite, Salesforce, or Snowflake.
Dimension mapping	Matching raw source values (a department name from HR) to your canonical hierarchy so every report agrees.
Curation	The automatic step that turns raw ingested rows into clean, canonical records.
Pipeline freshness	A health signal showing whether each feed synced on time, so a silent failure cannot hide for a month.
Field masking	Hiding sensitive values (such as salary) from roles that should not see them, even in exports.

Cannot find a term? Ask Nova in the app. Nova reads this glossary, so it can define any of these terms in the context of your own numbers.