--- title: "Entity" summary: "An entity is the real-world thing a set of records is asserted to describe — in Entity Bind, one company or organisation, holding a stable identifier that survives the records attaching to it." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/glossary/entity last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # Entity > An entity is the real-world thing a set of records is asserted to describe — in Entity Bind, one company or organisation, holding a stable identifier that survives the records attaching to it. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/glossary/entity Last updated: 2026-10-15 Glossary · Foundations ## How to read this The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. [Filed under foundations](https://entitybind.com/glossary#foundations). By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## What entity means An entity is the thing itself, as distinct from any description of it. A company exists whether or not it appears in your CRM; the entity is the resolver's representation of that company, carrying an identifier that does not change when a new record arrives, a name changes, or an address is corrected. The distinction between an entity and a record is the one most data models get wrong first. A record is an observation with a source and a timestamp. An entity is an assertion that a set of observations belong together. Storing only records loses the assertion; storing only entities loses the ability to say where a value came from, or to reverse the assertion later. An entity is not necessarily a legal person. A group with one trading name and eleven registered subsidiaries can be represented as eleven entities with ownership between them or as one, and the right answer depends on the question being asked — accounts payable usually wants the legal person that gets paid, while a sales team usually wants the group. Entity Bind resolves to the legal person on the register and expresses group structure as sourced ownership facts rather than by collapsing it, because collapsing is not reversible and citing is. Every entity Entity Bind holds is a company or an organisation. There is no person entity in the model, and none is planned. ## Where this shows up in Entity Bind Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price. - [What is entity resolution?](https://entitybind.com/guides/what-is-entity-resolution): Entity resolution decides which records in one or more datasets refer to the same real-world entity, and joins them under a single stable identifier. - [How it works](https://entitybind.com/how-it-works): The seven-stage cascade in order, what each stage can settle on its own, and what it hands to the next. - [Register coverage](https://entitybind.com/coverage): The registers the resolver reads, the licence each one publishes under, and how often a live entity's name is unique once it is tidied to a common form. The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The terms next to this one Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one. - [Record](https://entitybind.com/glossary/record): A record is one observation of an entity from one source at one time — the unit that arrives, is compared and is attached, never the unit that is trusted on its own. - [Cluster](https://entitybind.com/glossary/cluster): A cluster is the set of records a resolver has decided belong to one entity, and the object that cluster-level metrics are scored against. - [Golden record](https://entitybind.com/glossary/golden-record): A golden record is the single assembled view of an entity built by choosing one value per field from the records attached to it, ideally with the provenance of each choice carried alongside it. - [Entity resolution](https://entitybind.com/glossary/entity-resolution): Entity resolution is the process of deciding which records, across one or many datasets, refer to the same real-world thing — and, when the evidence does not settle it, deciding that too. - [Beneficial ownership](https://entitybind.com/glossary/beneficial-ownership): Beneficial ownership is the question of which natural persons ultimately own or control a company, as distinct from the legal owners recorded on its share register. ### Answered at length elsewhere - [LEI](https://entitybind.com/identifiers/lei) (Identifier): One LEI names one legal entity worldwide, and most companies hold none. An agreeing LEI settles a match with no model call, a conflicting one against. ## The other 9 terms on this shelf What the problem is called, and what the objects in it are. Entity, record, cluster, and the four industry names for the same job. - [Entity resolution](https://entitybind.com/glossary/entity-resolution) - [Record linkage](https://entitybind.com/glossary/record-linkage) - [Deduplication](https://entitybind.com/glossary/deduplication) - [Record](https://entitybind.com/glossary/record) - [Cluster](https://entitybind.com/glossary/cluster) - [Golden record](https://entitybind.com/glossary/golden-record) - [Survivorship](https://entitybind.com/glossary/survivorship) - [Master data management (MDM)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/master-data-management) - [Reference data](https://entitybind.com/glossary/reference-data) Previous, alphabetically: [Edit distance](https://entitybind.com/glossary/edit-distance) · Next, alphabetically: [Entity resolution](https://entitybind.com/glossary/entity-resolution) ## Evidence basis Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. ## Start with your own company records. Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [All 64 terms](https://entitybind.com/glossary) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/glossary/entity, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.