# Firms, Customers, Endpoints

> How the partner portal counts: a firm holds customers, a customer holds accounts, an account holds endpoints, and each endpoint holds one address.

*Source: https://www.whisper.security/docs/partners/model*

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The portal counts in four levels and keeps them apart on purpose. Your firm is the company you sign in as. A customer is a company you manage. An account is a Whisper principal and its key, held under a customer. An endpoint is one machine, agent or controller, and the address it answers on.

## Your firm

The firm is your own company. It is kept apart from a customer, which is a company you manage, so nothing a colleague does inside your firm is ever confused with something done inside an estate you are managing. Colleagues are members of the firm and carry a role there; [your team and roles](/docs/partners/team) covers what each role reaches.

## A customer

A customer is one company. The roster under it is flat: no sites, and no sub-organisations beneath a company.

When you add one, you also record its adoption shape: one account for the whole company, or an account for each person who works there. The shape is a label you read on the row, not a branch in the product. An email domain can be recorded beside it.

## An account

An account is a Whisper principal and its key. Endpoints live under an account, and one customer can hold a single account or many.

The account is the level the control plane works at. That is why a firm reaches a customer by holding [that customer's key](/docs/partners/keys): the portal signs in as your firm, and then acts inside the estate as the account.

## An endpoint and its identity

An endpoint is one machine, agent or controller, and the routable IPv6 `/128` it answers on. The address is the identity. It is allocated out of Whisper-held address space and published in public DNS and in the public registry, so anyone can check it with no account here and nothing installed on the machine. [Agent identity](/docs/identity) describes the proof chain behind it.

An endpoint that cannot carry a sensor is still an endpoint. It holds an address and resolves names through the customer's policy, which is enough to be seen, scored and contained.

## The estate, and the grant over it

An estate is everything belonging to one customer on the plane: its accounts, its endpoints, its policy and its record.

A grant is the authority a customer gives your firm to act inside that estate. Without a grant the portal reads nothing from it and says so, rather than rendering a zero. A zero reads as a quiet customer, and an unread estate is not a quiet one.

## One customer, end to end

A company is added with one account for the whole company. Its laptops bind to that account, each taking its own address. A controller that cannot run a sensor is added the same way and resolves names through the same policy. All of it is one estate, reached with one key, and it appears in the book as a single row with everything it is carrying beside it.