The vocabulary of multi-entity finance, applied AI, and the work we do.
Plain-English definitions of the terms our clients and partners actually use — written by the people who do the work, not by an SEO content farm. Use this as a working reference, or send a link to the team member who keeps asking what NAV means.
Running multiple entities like one operation
The accounting, reporting, and operational vocabulary for owners running multiple LLCs, holding companies, or related entities — the work that lives between QuickBooks files, spreadsheets, and the parts no one taught you in school.
Multi-entity finance
The full stack of accounting, reporting, and operations across two or more related legal entities under common ownership.
Multi-entity accounting
Bookkeeping discipline applied across multiple entities — separate books, shared chart of accounts, and clean intercompany handling.
Intercompany elimination
Removing transactions between related entities when you consolidate, so the same dollar is not counted twice.
Cross-entity rollup
A single view that aggregates cash, P&L, balances, or other figures across every entity an owner controls.
Consolidated financials
Financial statements presenting a parent and its subsidiaries as if they were one economic entity.
Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI)
The federal Corporate Transparency Act filing that requires most US entities to report their beneficial owners to FinCEN.
Entity-aware document vault
A document repository where every file is tagged to the entity it belongs to, with search and access scoped per entity.
AI as it actually shows up in real businesses
The terms that matter when you are deciding whether a real AI workflow makes sense for a specific operational task. Skip the buzzwords; these are the concepts you will actually use.
Applied AI
AI deployed against a specific operational task with measurable outcomes — not a research project or a chatbot demo.
Large language model (LLM)
A model trained to read and write language — the engine behind ChatGPT, Claude, and most modern AI workflows.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
Letting a language model look up your documents before it answers, so it grounds responses in your data instead of guessing.
Agentic workflow
Software that uses a language model to actually perform tasks — read documents, take actions, follow up, hand off to humans.
Document intelligence
Reading, classifying, and extracting structured data from unstructured documents — receipts, invoices, leases, contracts, statements.
Embedding
How AI turns text into numbers, so meaning can be searched, matched, or compared at scale.
Fine-tuning
Adapting a general-purpose model to your specific vocabulary, data, and decisions.
How software IP gets developed, owned, and monetized
Vocabulary for the licensing side of the business — useful for software vendors, platforms, and operators evaluating whether to build, buy, or license a piece of functionality.
IP licensing
Granting another party the right to use your intellectual property under defined terms — instead of selling it outright.
Exclusive license
A license where the licensor agrees not to grant the same rights to anyone else — including, sometimes, themselves.
Royalty rate
The price a licensee pays the licensor for the use of intellectual property — usually a percentage of revenue or a per-use fee.
White-label license
A license that lets the licensee resell or embed the IP under their own brand.
Master license agreement (MLA)
The umbrella contract that governs all licensing transactions between two parties, with specific deals attached as schedules.
IP assignment
The full transfer of ownership of intellectual property from one party to another — not a license, an outright sale.
The mechanics behind running a fund
Terms every fund manager, emerging GP, and back-office partner needs cold. Useful for anyone evaluating fund-admin software or building it.
Fund administration
The back-office function that keeps a fund's books, valuations, investor records, and capital activity clean and reportable.
Capital call
A demand from a fund to its investors to deliver part of their committed capital, used to make investments or pay expenses.
Net asset value (NAV)
The current value of a fund's assets minus its liabilities — the number that determines what a fund interest is worth.
Waterfall distribution
The rules that determine how cash flowing out of a fund is split between investors and the GP.
Management fee
The recurring fee the GP charges to operate the fund — usually a percentage of committed capital or NAV.
Compliance vocabulary for GovCon
The acronyms small federal contractors live and die by. If you are bidding on, performing, or auditing government work, these are the terms you cannot bluff.
DCAA compliance
Meeting the audit standards of the Defense Contract Audit Agency — primarily for cost accounting, time tracking, and indirect rates.
SAM.gov registration
The active record in the System for Award Management that lets a business receive federal contracts and payments.
CMMC readiness
The state of being prepared to demonstrate Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification — required for most DoD contractors.
How the back office actually runs
The day-to-day vocabulary of the work AMG automates — bookkeeping motion, monthly close, and the rest of the workflow that lives between the spreadsheet and the GL.
Transaction categorization
Assigning every transaction in your books to the right account, entity, and tag — the foundation of every other financial workflow.
Monthly close
The recurring process of finalizing a month's books — reconciling, adjusting, reviewing, and locking — so reports can be trusted.
A term we should add?
The glossary grows with the work we do. If there is a concept you wish had a plain-English definition you could point a teammate at, tell us and we will write it.