Four systems, one record.
Identity, commerce, people and connections are usually four purchases. We build them as one system, because the questions organizations actually ask cut across all four.
The systems
Four domains
What each domain is responsible for.
Identity
Who someone is, which organization they belong to, and what they are allowed to do. Every other system reads from this one rather than keeping its own copy of the answer.
Commerce
Orders, payments, billing and the ledger underneath them. What was sold, what was owed, what was settled, and a record of each that survives the transaction.
People
Employment, membership, roles and profiles. The organization chart and the people directory stop being two documents that disagree by the end of the quarter.
Connections
The links between organizations — onboarding, invitations, shared access and the systems already in place that have to keep working.
Identity
The system the others read from
One answer to who someone is.
Identity holds people, the organizations they belong to, and what each of them is permitted to do. Roles, memberships, professions and delegated access are all expressed against it.
Every other domain reads from identity rather than keeping its own user table. That is the constraint that makes the rest of the platform coherent: a person removed from an organization loses access to its orders, its payroll and its partner connections in the same moment, because there was only ever one place that answered the question.
Commerce
Orders through to the ledger
What was sold, owed and settled.
Commerce covers orders, invoicing, payment and the ledger they post to. A sale, the money against it and the entry recording it are one chain rather than three systems reconciled at month end.
Because commerce reads identity, an order knows which organization it belongs to and which people were entitled to place it — without a second copy of either.
People
Employment and membership
The directory and the org chart, as one thing.
People covers employment, membership, roles and profiles. Joining, moving team, changing responsibility and leaving are changes to the same record that identity and commerce already read.
The practical result is that the people directory and the organization chart cannot disagree, because they are two views of one set of facts rather than two documents maintained by different teams.
Connections
Between organizations
Working with organizations you do not control.
Organizations do not operate alone. Suppliers, partners, contractors and member bodies all need some access to each other, and almost none of them want to adopt each other software.
Connections covers onboarding, invitations and scoped access across organizational boundaries, along with the interfaces that let systems already in place keep working rather than being replaced as a precondition.
See how it comes together in the platform.