The words behind the till
Plain explanations of the terms that show up on your reports, your kitchen tickets and your supplier invoices. No jargon for its own sake.
Selling & tills
3 termsKOT (Kitchen Order Ticket)
A KOT is the ticket that tells the kitchen what to cook. When an order is taken, the POS prints or displays a Kitchen Order Ticket listing the items, quantities and any special instructions, so the kitchen works from the order rather than from memory or a shouted request.
KDS (Kitchen Display System)
A KDS is a screen in the kitchen that replaces printed tickets. Orders appear live as they are taken, staff mark them done as they go out, and nothing depends on paper that can be lost, smudged or stuck to a rail out of order.
Modifier
A modifier is a choice or extra attached to a product — size, milk type, spice level, extra cheese. It changes what the kitchen makes and often what the customer pays, without needing a separate product for every combination.
Stock & recipes
5 termsRecipe costing
Recipe costing means listing the ingredients and quantities behind a menu item so the system knows what each sale really costs. Once a recipe is attached, every sale deducts the right stock and prices itself against real cost rather than a guess.
Wastage
Wastage is stock you paid for but never sold — spoiled produce, burnt or dropped food, breakages, and items past their date. Logging it with a reason is what turns an invisible leak into a number you can act on.
Stock take
A stock take is physically counting what you have and comparing it to what the system says you should have. The gap between the two is the number that matters — it reveals theft, waste that was never logged, and recipes that are wrong.
Par level
A par level is the minimum quantity of an item you want to keep on hand. When stock drops to it, it is time to reorder — early enough that delivery arrives before you run out.
Purchase order (PO)
A purchase order is the record of what you asked a supplier to deliver, at what quantity and price, before it arrives. Receiving against it is what catches short deliveries and quiet price rises.
Money & margins
4 termsZ-Report
A Z-Report is the end-of-day summary a POS prints when you close a shift. It totals every sale, discount and payment method for that shift, compares the cash the drawer should hold against what you actually counted, and then resets the counters to zero for the next day.
COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
COGS is what the things you sold actually cost you to make or buy — ingredients, packaging and the stock itself, but not rent or salaries. Sales minus COGS gives you gross profit, which is the number that tells you whether your prices are working.
Gross margin
Gross margin is the share of a sale you keep after paying for the item itself, written as a percentage. Sell a coffee for 15 QAR that costs 4 QAR in beans, milk and cup, and your gross margin is about 73%.
Cash float
The cash float is the money you put in the drawer at the start of a shift so the cashier can give change. It is counted in at open and counted out at close, and it is never counted as sales.
Running the shop
3 termsShift reconciliation
Shift reconciliation is counting the drawer at the end of a shift and comparing it against what the system expected, so any difference is found the same day rather than at the end of the month.
Offline mode
Offline mode lets a POS keep taking orders and printing receipts when the internet is down, storing everything on the device and syncing it to the cloud once the connection returns.
RBAC (Role-based access control)
Role-based access control means each person only sees and does what their job requires — a cashier rings up sales, a manager approves refunds and reads reports, and nobody has more access than they need.