Concepts
PlaidCloud is built around a small set of concepts that compose. Once these click, the rest of the documentation is mostly about how to do specific things with them.
Organization, Workspace, Member
Section titled “Organization, Workspace, Member”Your account starts at the organization level — the billing and identity boundary. Inside an organization are one or more workspaces, which are isolated environments where actual work happens. Members are users who belong to an organization and are granted access to specific workspaces with specific roles.
- Most teams start with one workspace per environment (dev, staging, prod) or one per business unit.
- Security groups inside a workspace control what each member can do.
More: Access management
Project
Section titled “Project”A project is the unit of work inside a workspace. Each project owns its own data, workflows, dimensions, and audit history. Projects don’t share state with each other — they’re isolated.
Use projects to separate distinct analyses, business processes, or data products from each other.
More: Projects
Connection
Section titled “Connection”A connection is a saved configuration that lets PlaidCloud reach an external system — a database, a cloud storage account, an ERP, a REST API. Connections are reused by workflow steps so credentials aren’t duplicated across steps.
More: Connections (task) · Connectors (reference)
Table and View
Section titled “Table and View”A table is structured data inside a project — rows and columns, like a SQL table. Tables come from imports, transformations, or external sources. Views are saved query results layered on top of tables.
More: Tables and views
Workflow and Step
Section titled “Workflow and Step”A workflow is a pipeline that operates on tables. Each workflow is a sequence of steps: import a CSV, join two tables, filter rows, export to JSON, send a notification. Steps can run sequentially, in parallel, conditionally, or in loops.
Steps come in categories:
- Import — pull data in (CSV, Excel, SQL, Parquet, JSON, etc.)
- Tables — transform tables (join, filter, melt, pivot, append, upsert)
- Export — push data out
- Document — handle PDFs, images, and arbitrary files
- Notifications — send messages via email, Slack, Teams, SMS, webhook
- Allocation — execute cost allocation models
- Dimension — build and modify hierarchies
- SAP / SAP-PCM — call SAP-specific operations
- Workflow control — variables, loops, sub-workflows
More: Workflows (task) · Workflow steps (reference)
Dimension
Section titled “Dimension”A dimension is a hierarchy — typically used for slicing or aggregating data. Cost centers, products, geography, time. Dimensions can be built from tables, loaded from external sources, or modified incrementally.
Allocations use dimensions to decide what to allocate to what.
More: Dimensions
Allocation
Section titled “Allocation”An allocation spreads values from one set of rows to another based on driver data and rules. Think transfer pricing, activity-based costing, IT chargeback, profitability — any time you have a pool of cost that needs to be distributed across consumers.
Allocations combine tables (values, drivers, results), dimensions (the rules), and workflow steps (to execute the model).
More: Allocations
Dashboard
Section titled “Dashboard”A dashboard is a published, interactive view of project data. Build from published tables and views.
More: Dashboards
AI Assistant
Section titled “AI Assistant”A project-scoped chat for asking questions about your data and workflows. Conversations persist and are isolated per project.
More: AI Assistant
How They Fit Together
Section titled “How They Fit Together”A typical end-to-end flow:
- Set up a connection to your source system.
- Inside a project, build a workflow that:
- Imports data via the connection (creates tables)
- Transforms with table steps
- Joins with dimensions for context
- Allocates if you’re doing cost spreading
- Publishes the result
- A dashboard reads the published tables.
- Workspace members browse the dashboard or query results via the AI Assistant.