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Key Concepts

Before the step-by-step guides, it helps to see how the pieces fit together. Almost everything you do as an advocate follows one spine:

The household is the group a client belongs to. It has a location and members. Members are either clients (people with their own service record) or contacts (non-client members like a spouse or child, recorded for context). Every household has one Head of Household. See Clients and Households.

A client is a person who receives services and has their own profile — the home base for everything you know about them. A client can be the Head of Household or a regular member. See The Client Profile.

An interaction is the record of a time you engaged with a client — the why, when, where, and context. Think of it as a container that holds notes, location and channel, timing, and the actions taken. See Interactions Overview.

An action is a concrete thing done during or after an interaction — a referral, a pickup, a follow-up, a form, and so on. Actions are the workhorse: notes alone aren’t enough. Adding an action is what ties an interaction to a program, draws against budgets and limits, and creates trackable work. See Interaction Actions.

Wayfinder is your universal worklist. Every action you add becomes an entry here, where it can be assigned, worked, and completed — so what you log in an interaction is what shows up as work to do. See Wayfinder.

Your organization has one or more locations. Interactions and the check-in queue are tied to the location you’re working at, which is how multi-site organizations keep their queues and reporting separate.


The short version: you work with a client, you log an interaction, you add actions, and those actions become your worklist in Wayfinder.