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Core concepts
Companies, people, files, versions, reports and rules: the seven ideas everything else is built from.
Gridline has a small vocabulary. Learn these seven words and every other guide will read easily.
Company
A company is you and your organisation: the unit that signs up, chooses a plan, and pays. Everything Gridline stores belongs to exactly one company, and one company can never see another's data. If you ask for something that belongs to a different company, the answer is 404 Not Found, as though it did not exist.
People and roles
A company has people. The first person is the admin; the admin invites employees. Admins can do everything. Employees can upload, read the files they are allowed to see, and work with their own account.
| Admin | Employee | |
|---|---|---|
| Upload and read files they can see | Yes | Yes |
| Share or delete their own files | Yes | Yes |
| See every file in the company | Yes | Only company-wide files and ones shared with them |
| Invite and remove people | Yes | No |
| Quality rules | Create, edit, delete | Read only |
| Plans, billing and the audit log | Yes | No |
File
A file is a spreadsheet you uploaded: CSV, XLS or XLSX. Gridline looks at the file's contents to decide what it is, never at its name. Each file has an owner (the person who uploaded it) and a visibility: the whole company, or only some people.
Version
Data comes back: the March export, then April's. Instead of a pile of near-identical files, upload the next one as a version of the first. Gridline lists the file once, as its newest version, and can show exactly what changed between any two.
Report
Every upload gets a quality report: how many rows and columns, how much is missing, which columns mix numbers and text, how many rows repeat, and a score out of 100. A short plain-language summary is added when it is available. The report is built in the background and never reads your cell values aloud.
Rule
A rule is something you decide good data must satisfy, such as "the email column is at most 5% empty". Write it once and Gridline checks every upload against it. Each report shows which rules passed and which did not, and that drives the score.
Plan
A plan sets how many files you can upload each billing period, how many people you can invite, how many rules and versions you can keep, and how many requests per minute your company can make. There are three: Free, Basic and Premium. See Plans and billing.
Two ways to sign in
- A session is for a person using the dashboard. You sign in with a password or Google and get a short-lived token.
- An API key is for a program. It acts as the person who made it, limited to the scopes they chose.
Read Authentication for how both work.