Understanding Tickets: REDA's Process Engine

If a deal's stage ever seems to move on its own, a ticket moved it. Tickets are REDA's controlled way of running business processes — signing a lease, executing a move-in, renewing, evicting, disbursing a loan, logging a parcel at the front desk. Every REDA user meets them, usually because one appears on a deal "by itself." This article explains what a ticket is, names all 17 ticket types and what each does, shows why moving a ticket moves its deal, and covers the two things that surprise people most: system-created tickets that arrive already finished, and the cancellation that rewinds a deal a stage. It's the concept behind every business process in REDA; the step-by-step for each process lives in its own section, and we map those at the end.

What a ticket is

A ticket is a numbered, tracked "process instance" attached to a deal and/or a property. Think of it as one run of one business process, with a life of its own: its own status, its own documents and dates, its own audit trail of who did what and when. Each ticket is numbered automatically — T-0000000001 and up — labelled simply Ticket, and its record shows a Path across the top driven by its Status.

Why does REDA use tickets at all, instead of letting you edit a deal's stage directly? Because a lease agreement isn't just "set the stage to signed" — it's a real event with a signed document, a signing date, a move-in date, and consequences (charges, invoices, the next process). The ticket captures all of that as an auditable transaction, and the deal's stage follows the ticket. That's the core idea, and everything else in this article is a consequence of it.

A few fields appear on most tickets, at the label level:

The 17 ticket types

Every ticket is one of 17 types, and the type fixes both the statuses available and the automation that runs. Here's each type, what it does in one line, and the section that owns its step-by-step how-to — this table doubles as your map to the rest of the KB.

How a ticket drives its deal

Here's the mechanism at the heart of REDA. When you move a ticket's Status, REDA moves the deal's stage to match, and often spawns the next records. The status change on the ticket is running the process. A few examples, all from the leasing lifecycle:

• Set a Lease Agreement ticket to In Process or Contract Sent, and the deal moves to "Agreement - In Process." Set it to Contract Signed or Closed, and the deal moves to "Occupied - Pending Move In" — which itself creates the Move In ticket.
• Close a Move In ticket, and the deal moves to "Occupied - No Notice" — which, when renewal automation is on, creates the next Renewal ticket.
• Close a Move Out ticket, and the deal moves to "Expired."
• The PMA, Sales, and Acquisition agreement tickets walk their deals to "Under Contract."

Which deal a ticket will accept

Because the ticket type is the process, each type is picky about the deal you attach it to — it only accepts a deal of the right kind, and often in the right stage. This is why the deal you expect sometimes won't appear in a ticket's Parent Opportunity lookup, or why saving stops with a message. A few of the most common you'll meet, in REDA's own words:

The pattern to remember: the type fixes the process, and the process fixes the deal. When a ticket refuses a deal, it isn't broken — the deal simply isn't at the point this process runs from. The full list of these messages, and what to do about each, lives in Ticket Troubleshooting.

Who creates tickets

Tickets come into being three ways, and knowing which is which explains a lot of "where did this come from?" moments.

Approval status

Separate from where a process stands is a second gate: Approval Status, with values Draft, Waiting for Approval, Approved, and Rejected. Its purpose, in plain terms, is that REDA's automation acts only on approved tickets — it's used mainly for inflation. Nine ticket types start life as Draft: Acquisition Agreement, Eviction, Loan Disbursement, Move In, Move Out, New Charge/Memo, Renewal, Sales Agreement, and Termination.

One nuance worth knowing: the Lease Agreement process approves its own ticket as part of signing. So if you notice a Lease Agreement ticket reads "Approved" without you touching it, that's expected — you don't approve those by hand.

Cancelling a ticket: the stage revert

This is the single concept that prevents the most confusion, so it's worth getting exactly right.

When a ticket is created, REDA quietly records the deal's stage at that moment — a snapshot, written once, so the original stage survives later edits. Then, when you set the ticket's Status to Cancelled, REDA applies one universal rule:

That conditional is the safety net. Cancel a Lease Agreement ticket while the deal still sits in "Agreement - In Process," and the deal snaps back to where it was when the ticket was created. But if some other process has since moved the deal onward, the cancellation leaves it untouched — a cancel never clobbers a stage another process now owns.

Some ticket types clean up their own extras on cancel: a Lease Agreement cancel clears the move-in date; a Move Out cancel clears the move-out dates and cancels its inspections; a Renewal cancel deletes that renewal's not-yet-invoiced charges and re-points to the prior closed renewal; a Sales Agreement cancel also reverts the property's sale status. And a few types have no cancel automation at all — PMA (its Cancelled status drives nothing), Add/Remove Lease Charge (no Cancelled status), and New Package. The section article for each process covers its specifics.

Parent and child tickets

Some processes spawn others, and the Parent Ticket field links the two. The clearest case is a Move Out ticket created by an Eviction, a Termination, or an opted-out Renewal. When a Move Out has such a parent, the parent process owns the notice stage — so a child Move Out moving to In Process does not set the notice stage itself; its eviction or termination parent already handled that.

When automation fails

When a system-run process can't complete, REDA doesn't fail silently. The ticket lands in Processing Error and records the reason in an error note on the ticket. A filled error note usually means the ticket needs an administrator. Recovery — for inflation, via a reprocess action — is covered in Ticket Troubleshooting.

Tickets vs their look-alikes

A few REDA records look ticket-shaped but aren't part of the ticket engine. Keeping them straight avoids the classic mix-ups:

The one front-desk process that is a ticket is the New Package/Parcel type — parcels are logged and handed over inside the ticket engine.

Vocabulary, once

These terms recur across the whole KB; here's the canonical meaning of each.

Worked example: one lease, told as tickets

Follow a single lease on Meridian Court #101 as a chain of tickets:

Now the counterfactual that shows the revert. Had the agent cancelled T-…01 while the deal still sat in "Agreement - In Process," the deal would have snapped back to "Application - Approved" — its snapshot. But if some other process had already carried the deal onward, cancelling T-…01 would have left the deal exactly where it was.

The Tickets tab list view — the Record Type column tells the ticket types apart at a glance, from Lease Agreement and New Package/Parcel to Loan Payoff and PMA.

A Lease Agreement ticket — the status Path runs along the top, and the Parent Opportunity field links straight back to the lease deal it belongs to.

A lease deal's Tickets list — tickets accumulate under the deal as its lifecycle advances; here the Lease Agreement ticket sits alongside a New Package/Parcel ticket, each with its own status.

Where the how-tos live

This article is the concept. Each business process has its own step-by-step:

1. Leasing lifecycle — From Application to Move-In, Renewing a Lease, Notice, Move-Out & Lease End, Eviction & Termination, Adjusting Lease Charges, Tenant Referrals.
2. Billing — Inflation Adjustments (the born-closed tickets).
3. Property management — PM Agreements.
4. Sales & acquisitions — The Sale Lifecycle, The Acquisition Lifecycle.
5. Lending — Disbursements & Payoffs.
6. Community — Packages & Parcels.
7. Tickets reference — The Ticket Catalog (what each of the 17 types is and does), Ticket Status Reference (every status per type), Ticket Troubleshooting (when a ticket won't move).

Frequently asked questions