Vocabulary
The words this documentation uses, what they mean, and — where they differ — what the app calls the same thing.
This is deliberately a short list. It is a subset of the developer glossary, not a translation of it. Nothing here means something different from what it means internally; some internal words are simply never used with an administrator. Inventing a second set of names for the same concepts is how a product ends up with three vocabularies, and the two hierarchies are confusing enough with one.
The words that matter
| Word | Means |
|---|---|
| Territory model | One named container for a complete territory structure — "Sales", "FY27 Plan". An org can have several; they do not interfere |
| Territory | One named area of responsibility inside a model, with a boundary and people in it |
| Tier | How deep a territory sits in your tree. The top tier is 1 |
| Census area | One of the four fixed sizes of geography that boundaries are made from: state, county, census tract, block group |
| Boundary | The shape of a territory: the merged outline of the census areas selected for it |
| Selection | The census areas currently picked on the map, before you save |
| Unassigned | The grey outlined area on the map — the part of your model no territory covers. It is not a territory |
| Coverage gap | Uncovered ground where records are actually landing. A record-level finding, not the grey area |
| Assignment | A record's link to a territory, made from the record's location |
| Membership | A person's place in a territory, with a role |
| Role | What someone does in a territory — Manager, Sales, Operations |
| Exception | One row in Assignment Exceptions: a record that could not be assigned, or was assigned from an address too coarse to trust |
Where this documentation and the app disagree
One place, and it is worth knowing about.
| Documentation | The app | Why |
|---|---|---|
| tier 2 | level 2 | Level is ambiguous here: it could mean a depth in your tree or a size of census area, and keeping those apart is the whole of The two hierarchies. The documentation says tier for your tree and census area for the geography |
⚠️ The app cannot currently display a name for a tier at all — only the number. There is a field for it and it is empty on every record, and whether it should be filled has not been decided. When it is, this row goes away.
Words you will meet elsewhere and not here
These are real, correct terms that appear in developer documentation, in the API, and in support conversations. They are listed so that meeting one is not a surprise.
| You may see | It means, in this documentation's words |
|---|---|
| GEOID | The Census Bureau's identifier for a census area. You never need it |
| Dissolve | Merging the selected census areas into one shape — what happens when you save a boundary |
| Block group | The finest census area. This documentation uses the term directly; it is the Census Bureau's word, not an invented one |
| Model-scoped | "Per territory model" — the reason two models can cover the same ground |
| Territory2 / Territory2Model | The Salesforce objects a territory and a model actually are. Territory Mapper adds to Salesforce's own territory management rather than replacing it |
| Ancestor chain | Every territory containing a point, from the top tier down |
| Feature | One census area, in API terms |
Words that describe things this product does not have
The most useful part of this page. Each of these gets used in conversation about territory tools, and each one is absent here.
| Word | Reality |
|---|---|
| Publish / draft | There is no publish step for a boundary. A saved boundary is live immediately, in every model state. Nothing is staged and there is no preview |
| Conflict / rejected | Nothing is ever rejected for overlapping. If you select an area another territory holds, it moves to you, silently. See what happens to a neighbour |
| Realignment | There is no realignment workflow. Do not clone a territory model — a clone gets new record ids and therefore no boundaries |
| Re-assignment | Changing a boundary does not move records. Use Re-run after a fix in the exception queue. A bulk boundary-change re-assignment with a preview and an audit trail is planned, not built |
| Contiguity | Not required and not checked. A territory can be in several unconnected pieces |
Last verified: 2026-08-09 · Owner: MapKraken Labs LLC
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