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Short definitions for every term you will meet in the docs and the API. Each links to the guide that covers it in depth.

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A

  • Account: A balance container in the ledger for one entity, asset, and bucket combination. Created automatically on first use. Ledger
  • Action: What a rule does when its condition matches: credit, debit, hold, tag, counter increment, and more. Rule Actions
  • Adjustment: A manual credit or debit you make directly through the API (the /balance/adjust endpoint), as opposed to a balance change made by a rule. Used for goodwill credits, corrections, and support operations. Balance Operations
  • allow_negative: Debit option that lets a balance go below zero, used for refund clawbacks after funds were spent. Balance Operations
  • Archive: Retiring a resource. Archived resources are hidden from default listings, but the consequences differ by resource: an archived asset is permanently retired, an archived program can be reactivated, an archived tier is ended for good, and an archived rule is a soft delete. Each resource’s guide states its own rules. Data Model
  • Asset: The unit of value participants earn and spend: points, cashback dollars, credits. Defined at the organization level and linked to one or more programs. Asset Configuration
  • Attribute: A key-value string on a participant or group, readable in rule conditions. Participants
  • Automation: A scheduled or triggered generator of events, such as a monthly reset or an anniversary bonus. Automations

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B

  • Breakage: Issued value that will never be redeemed, such as expired or forfeited balances. Recorded against the SYSTEM_BREAKAGE account. Reporting
  • Bucket: One of three pools inside every balance: AVAILABLE (spendable), HELD (reserved by holds), and DEFERRED (not yet matured). Ledger
  • Budget: A program-wide cap on how much a rule can issue per asset over a period. Shared across all participants, not per-participant. Writing Rules

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C

  • CEL: Common Expression Language, the syntax for rule conditions and dynamic values. CEL Expressions
  • Condition: The CEL expression that decides whether a rule’s actions fire for an event. Writing Rules
  • Counter: A named numeric value on a participant or group, incremented by rules or the API, readable in conditions. Participants

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D

  • Dynamic value (${{ }}): The wrapper that marks an action field value as a CEL expression, as in "amount": "${{ event.amount * 0.1 }}". Unwrapped values are literals. Rule Actions

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E

  • Enrollment: A participant’s per-program membership, separate from the participant’s own status. Created automatically when a participant’s first event reaches a program. Participants
  • Event: The input to Scrip: a signal from your application (a purchase, a signup) that triggers rule evaluation for one participant. Event Processing
  • Event trace: The rule_evaluations array on an event, recording which rules ran, matched, or were skipped when the event was processed. Event Processing
  • external_id: Your application’s identifier for a participant. Scrip resolves it to its own id. Participants

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F

  • Forfeit: Permanently removing balance from a participant or group, moving it to breakage. Balance Operations

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G

  • Group: A shared ledger entity for multiple participants: families, teams, organizational pools. Groups

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H

  • Hold / Release / Settle: The reservation flow. A hold moves funds from AVAILABLE to HELD; release returns them; a settle (a credit that references the hold) confirms them. Used for authorization/settlement card flows. Balance Operations

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I

  • Idempotency key: A caller-supplied key that makes retries safe. For events it is the event’s identity; for balance operations and redemptions, replays return the original result. API conventions
  • Inventory mode: The immutable asset setting choosing SIMPLE (one aggregate balance) or LOT (each credit tracked individually). Asset Configuration
  • Issuance policy: The immutable asset setting choosing UNLIMITED (credits mint new value) or PREFUNDED (credits draw from a funded program wallet). Asset Configuration
  • Issuer attribution: Knowing which program’s wallet funded a credit, tracked per lot for cross-program settlement. Lots & Expiration

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J

  • Journal entry: One immutable ledger record of a balance change, with balancing debit and credit postings. Ledger

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L

  • Ledger: The double-entry record of every balance change. Nothing is mutated in place. Ledger
  • Ledger entity: Anything that can hold balances: a participant, a group, a program wallet, or a system account. Ledger
  • Liability: The value you owe participants: outstanding balances not yet redeemed, expired, or forfeited. Reporting
  • Lot: An individually tracked credit with its own remaining amount, issuer, and optional expiration or maturity dates. Debits consume the oldest eligible lots first. Lots & Expiration

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M

  • Maturity: A future date before which a credited lot sits in the DEFERRED bucket. Used for vesting. Lots & Expiration

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O

  • Order: A rule’s or rule set’s current position in its execution sequence, always numbered 1, 2, 3 and so on with no gaps. Scrip manages the numbering; you place things with position and the move/reorder endpoints. Rule Sets
  • Organization: The top-level tenant. Programs, assets, participants, and API keys all belong to one organization. Authentication

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P

  • Participant: A user in your system, identified by your external_id. Exists at the organization level and can enroll in multiple programs. Participants
  • Position: The semantic placement (first, last, before, after) used to place a rule or rule set when creating or moving it. Rule Sets
  • Posting: One side (debit or credit) of a journal entry, against one account and bucket. Ledger
  • Program: The top-level container for rule sets, rules, linked assets, and enrolled participants. Usually one per use case. Programs
  • Program wallet: The funded balance a PREFUNDED asset’s credits draw from. Empty wallet means credits fail. Programs

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R

  • Redemption: Spending balance, either against a reward catalog item or as a raw amount. Redemptions
  • Reservation: A durable authorization that claims an exact amount of a participant’s HELD balance for a pending redemption. Redemption lifecycle
  • Reversal: Clawing back what a completed event’s rules credited, capped at the original awards, with unrecoverable value reported as shortfall. Redemptions have their own reversal endpoint with the same capped, partial-friendly semantics. Reversing an Event
  • Reward: A catalog item participants can redeem balance for. Rewards Catalog
  • Rollforward: A liability report that reconciles a period: opening liability, plus issuance, minus redemptions, expirations, and forfeitures, equals closing liability. Reporting
  • Rule: A CEL condition paired with a list of actions, evaluated when events arrive. Writing Rules
  • Rule configuration: A program’s complete rule state: its rule sets, rules, positions, statuses, actions, and budgets, treated as one unit for changes, history, and rollback. Managing Rule Configuration
  • Rule configuration version: A counter on the program that goes up by one on every change to its rule configuration. Scrip stores the full configuration at each version, so you can list past versions, see what changed (the history endpoints call these records “revisions”), and roll back. Passing the current version with a write rejects the request if someone else changed the configuration first. Managing Rule Configuration
  • Rule set: A named, ordered container for rules. Sets run in order, rules run in order inside each set, and stop_after_match stops only its own set. Rule Sets

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S

  • Scale: The immutable number of decimal places for an asset’s amounts. Asset Configuration
  • stop_after_match: Rule flag that skips the remaining rules in the same rule set after this rule matches and executes. Other sets continue. Rule Sets
  • System accounts: The ledger’s world-side accounts: SYSTEM_ISSUANCE (source of minted value), SYSTEM_REDEMPTION (destination of redeemed value), and SYSTEM_BREAKAGE (destination of expired or forfeited value). Ledger

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T

  • Tag: A boolean label on a participant or group, such as vip, readable in conditions. Participants
  • Tier: A ranked level in a progression track, assigned to participants directly, by rules, or by automatic qualification. Tiers
  • Transfer: An atomic movement of value between two participants or groups. Transfers

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V

  • Void-hold: Cancelling a provisional credit that landed directly in HELD, used to reverse card authorizations. Balance Operations

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W

  • Webhook: A signed HTTP delivery Scrip sends to your endpoint when something happens: an event completes, a balance changes, a participant is created. Webhooks