Concepts and glossary

Certivant has a small number of core concepts that show up across every screen. Once you know these, the rest of the documentation will read clearly.

Organization

The top-level container for your work. Each business that uses Certivant is one organization (also called an "org" or sometimes a "tenant" in technical docs). When you sign in, you're always operating inside one organization at a time — its name appears in the top-left corner of the sidebar.

An organization owns:

• Members — the people who can sign in and do work.
• Teams — optional sub-groups inside the organization.
• Verification requests — the KYC and KYB checks you run on your clients.
• Forms — reusable verification templates.
• Settings, plan, billing, and credit balance — all scoped to this one org.

You can belong to multiple organizations (for example, if you do work for two different agencies). The organization switcher in the top-left lets you move between them — it only appears when you actually have more than one.

Member

A user who belongs to an organization. Every member has an organization role: owner, admin, or member. The role decides what they can change inside the org.

• Owner — full control. There's normally just one owner (the person who created the org or who legally controls it).
• Admin — can manage everything the owner can manage, except deleting the org or changing the owner.
• Member — can do day-to-day work (review verifications, submit forms) but not change organization settings, billing, or membership.

See Roles at a glance for the full breakdown.

Team

An optional sub-group inside an organization. Teams are useful for agencies with multiple self-employed professionals (think real-estate brokers, mortgage brokers, insurance agents) where each professional runs their own book of business inside the same legal entity.

A team has its own team role per member:

• Team owner — runs the team, can add or remove team members, can rename or delete the team.
• Team admin — same as team owner, but can't delete the team.
• Team user — works inside the team but doesn't manage its membership.

Team roles are independent of organization roles. A user can be an org member and a team_owner at the same time — they're just a member of the org overall, but they run their own team.

KYC vs KYB

Both are verifications, but they verify different things.

• KYC stands for "Know Your Customer." It verifies a person — their identity, often with a government ID and a selfie.
• KYB stands for "Know Your Business." It verifies a business entity — registration documents, beneficial owners, sometimes a business license.

The KYC and KYB sections of the app share the same shell, the same list/detail screens, the same review experience — they just operate on different request types.

Applicant

The person or business being verified. Each verification request has exactly one applicant. The applicant fills out the verification by clicking the email link you send them — see Send a verification request.

The applicant doesn't need a Certivant account. They go through a public hosted flow.

Verification request

A single "I want to verify this applicant" record. Has a status — pending, processing, approved, rejected, escalated — and a history of every check that's been run on it. You can review the request and override the automated decision if needed.

Form

A reusable verification template — defines which fields to collect, which documents to ask for, which checks to run. When you send a verification request you can attach a form to it so the applicant fills out the right inputs.

Trial / PAYG / Subscription

The three billing states an organization can be in:

• Trial — a free time-limited window when you first sign up. After 14 days the trial ends.
• Subscription — a paid plan with a monthly verification quota.
• PAYG (pay-as-you-go) — no subscription, but you've bought credits. Each verification deducts one credit. Useful for occasional usage or as a fallback when a trial ends.

If a trial ends without either a subscription or a credit balance, the organization enters trial-expired mode and most features are paused until someone fixes the billing situation. See Billing & credits.

Super admin

A platform-level role outside of any one organization. Super admins operate the Certivant deployment itself — managing customer organizations, configuring payment gateways, editing global plans, etc. This is documented under the Admin section and is not the same as an org owner.

Related

• Your first organization
• Roles at a glance