Glossary — every domain word, in one plain sentence¶

What this covers. This is the dictionary for the whole domain bible. Every term, abbreviation, and shortcut the other chapters lean on is defined here in one clear sentence — plus a short why or a tiny example where that helps it land. It is grouped by area (foundations → the ledger → locations → scope → items → units → costing → recipes → procurement → sales → documents → close → fixed assets → the financial boundary → food safety → catalog → menus and storefronts → tenancy), so you can read it straight through once to build the vocabulary, then come back to it as a lookup. Entries define the domain concept and the canonical industry name for it; they are not a catalog of the words a programmer would type.

Foundations¶

Perpetual inventory — the discipline where on-hand quantity is kept current after every receipt, sale, transfer, and adjustment, and is read back by summing the record of movements rather than from a stored running total. Value is derived the same way, at a price that is provisional inside the open period and struck once at the close. Why: a stored total drifts and hides who changed what; a summed one cannot.

Periodic inventory — the opposite discipline, where on-hand is established only now and then by a physical count, and what was used is inferred by subtraction (opening + purchases + transfers − closing). The system runs perpetually for the live book and uses a periodic count to true it up at the close.

Perpetual vs periodic — the pairing of the two above: the perpetual book is a running claim about what should be on hand; the periodic physical count is the truth event that reconciles it, because theft, spoilage, and over-portioning are visible only to a count.

Derive, don't store — the rule that on-hand, value and profit are computed from their governing facts, not maintained as editable totals. A posted count can supply an operational starting quantity for the items it explicitly observed; a close establishes settled evidence.

On-hand — the quantity held at a storage location, derived from the latest posted observation of that item and later movements, or otherwise from the preceding close or initial balances. Dates before the warehouse's opening read the earlier journal. See book basis.

Correction — putting a mistaken business fact right. While its period is open, the document and its movements are corrected together. Once the period is closed, the mistake is answered by a new dated fact in the open period. A goods receipt is the exception: it is corrected only by a period reopening, which returns the closed span to reconciliation.

Taught in: Stock ledger, Invariants.

The ledger¶

Stock movement — one record of stock changing place: which item, how much (an unsigned quantity, in the item's base unit), out of which location, into which location, on which business date, and the reason. It is the atom everything else is summed from. Example: a flour delivery is one movement from the supplier into the back-room storage location, 25 kg, reason "supply".

Stock-move journal — the dated record of all stock movements; the source of quantity and value, settled while the governing close remains in force. One movement shape covers receipt, sale, transfer, waste, count adjustment, and production — there is no separate "type" for each.

Double-entry location moves — the principle that every movement is a move between two locations, so an increase in one place is always a decrease in another and the total quantity in the world is conserved. There is no bare "in" or "out", only a transfer between two places — and suppliers, customers, scrap, and production are themselves locations (see virtual location). Why: one primitive then covers all six operations uniformly, and transfers and production come out naturally two-sided instead of as special cases.

Quant — the canonical name for derived on-hand: the physical-state view you get from the governing period-start boundary and the later movements over the storage locations a business manages. There is no stored quant; on-hand above is the quant, computed when you read it.

Valuation layer — the canonical name for the money view of stock, kept separate from quantity so value can change while quantity does not, and the reverse. Why the split matters: a transfer between your own warehouses moves quantity at no change in total value, and how you cost stock can change without any unit physically moving.

Valuation entry — an explicit, dated record of a value-only change: the way late value news reaches the books when the period it is about has already closed. Each one is linked to the document that caused it. Why explicit: value must never change silently — the quantity movements plus the valuation entries together reconstruct every derived figure.

Four conceptual layers — the mental model the ledger keeps even when the data is physically collapsed together: the boundary (the starting claim), the movement (the event), the quant (derived on-hand), and the valuation layer (value, kept apart from quantity).

Reason code — the label that tells apart two movements that share the same pair of locations, the way a sold dish and a staff meal both leave from a storage location to the customer and differ only by reason. Why: reporting can group by reason to separate "sold" from "consumed internally" without treating them as different kinds of event.

Business date — the calendar day a movement is counted on, expressed in the restaurant's own local clock, stamped once and permanently — so an event lands in the right day, and therefore the right accounting month, no matter when it was recorded or imported.

Taught in: Stock ledger.

Locations¶

Location — one end of a stock movement: anything goods can move from or into. The locations a business manages are its storage locations; the rest are virtual stand-ins (below), so that every operation can be a move between two locations.

Storage location — a count area the business manages inside one warehouse ("walk-in", "bar", "back room"). It is the bucket a quantity is counted in and the scope of one stock count; it carries no value of its own — value belongs to the warehouse around it. Why the two grains differ: you count where things are, and you value where they are all priced alike — so a move between two storage locations of one warehouse is value-neutral by construction.

Usage — the kind of a location: a storage location the business manages, or one of the six virtual kinds — supplier, customer, transit, scrap, production, stock loss.

Warehouse — the set of storage locations a business values together: one cost pool and one weighted-average cost per item. The same item has a distinct cost in each warehouse, because each warehouse is its own pool. A bar and a kitchen can be two warehouses, each with its own pool. Every warehouse admits exactly one class of item (see what a warehouse holds). In its accounting role it is the accounting contour (below).

Accounting contour — the warehouse named for what it is in the books: the one grain where valuation and the period close sit together, over exactly the storage locations it owns. Why the walk and the value are bound: a closing value is only auditable if a single complete walk of exactly those storage locations is the evidence for it.

What a warehouse holds — the class of item a warehouse admits: either everything the business buys to use up — stock it values, small tools it pools, consumables expensed at the door whether counted or not — or the identified units of the asset register, never both. It is chosen when the warehouse is created and may be restated only while the books are still empty — nothing has arrived, nothing is drafted or routed to land there, no period has closed. Why it cannot change after that: a contour that switched sides would hold a pool nobody may count and a register nobody may walk, and every draft aimed at it would read as a mismatch nobody made.

Admission (what a contour takes in) — the rule that what a warehouse holds is asked wherever something arrives: a receipt's placement, a count's quantity rows, a production run's floor, the receiving end of a transfer, a unit registered by hand. It is never asked of what is already there — existing balances stay countable, correctable, removable and closable whatever the contour now admits.

The two contours every business starts with — a business opens with one warehouse for operating stock, linked to the restaurant it feeds, and one for the asset register, which nothing is ever eaten out of. More of either kind are created when the business has a question its contours cannot answer.

Warehouse · storage location · note — the three rungs of "where is it?": the warehouse carries value and closes, the storage location carries the quantity and the custody, and a free-text note or label ("shelf 3", "with Vasya") preserves detail too fine for a list.

Placement decides the books — where a document names a storage location, the warehouse that owns that location is the one whose books carry the goods; the location is stated and the warehouse follows. Receipts and write-offs state it line by line, so one document may reach across warehouses; a count of any scope speaks for the one room it walked. Why the two are never both stated: naming them together lets them be named in conflict, and then the goods would sit in one place while their value sat somewhere else. A receipt line may reach a draft unplaced and be placed before it posts — why: the goods are put away while the paperwork is still being reviewed, and posting is the moment value lands on books.

Production floor — the storage location a prep session works on (a kitchen table, a prep room). An ordinary storage location inside the warehouse that feeds it: raw goods walk onto it by relocation, a session's ingredients leave it and that session's yield lands back on it, and it is counted and closed like any other. Why it needs no regime of its own: its stock is the warehouse's stock, priced by the same pool.

Valuation area — the canonical term for a warehouse in its valuing role: the contour in which stock is held at a cost. It is the same thing as a warehouse, named for what it does in the books.

Virtual location — a location the business does not manage: either outside its scope entirely (the supplier side of a receipt, the customer side of a sale) or kept by the system (the transit leg of a transfer, the scrap bin for waste, the production counterparty when a batch is made, the stock-loss counterparty for a count adjustment or a batch that overran its plan). Virtual locations are generic — the specific supplier or customer lives on the document, never on the location. Example: waste is just a movement from a storage location to scrap; a count shortage is from a storage location to stock loss.

The operations, as moves — receipt is supplier → storage location; sale is storage location → customer; transfer is storage location → transit → storage location; waste is storage location → scrap; a count overage is stock loss → storage location and a shortage is storage location → stock loss; producing something consumes storage location → production and yields production → storage location, and what a batch used beyond its plan issues storage location → stock loss.

Taught in: Scope & locations.

Scope axes¶

Company — the tenant: the top-level boundary that owns all of one business's data and isolates it from every other business's. Defined in full under Tenancy.

Warehouse (as a scope) — the grain at which stock is valued, held, and reconciled: one shared cost pool and one weighted-average cost per company, warehouse, and item. A warehouse may be a single restaurant's back-of-house store or a shared commissary that serves several restaurants. Its books also carry the fixed assets placed on it (see asset placement).

Valuation strategy as topology — the rule that how finely a company values its stock is decided by how many warehouses it creates, never by a setting: one materials warehouse gives one blended cost for the business; a warehouse per site gives independent pools, counts, and closes. Why no switch: a blended figure spanning warehouses that are walked on different days is confirmed by no single count, so it could not be audited from any one walk.

Profit center — the canonical name for a restaurant in its money role: the business unit whose food cost, cost of goods sold, and margin a consumption is charged to. It is stamped onto each consumption and never owns the stock pool. Why separate from the warehouse: who the cost belongs to (the restaurant's profit-and-loss) is independent of where the stock physically sat (the warehouse that held and valued it).

Channel — the way a sale reached the business, an entry in the company's own vocabulary (Glovo, the hall); an attribution label only, never a stock location. Defined in full under Menus and storefronts.

Consumption warehouse — the one current operating-stock warehouse a restaurant selects for the routing of sales, internal consumption and dish write-offs. Several restaurants may share it, with locations tracking their quantities and consumption carrying their separate attribution.

Valuation grain vs profit grain — the rule that crystallizes the split: stock is valued per warehouse, while a restaurant's profit-and-loss is a roll-up of the consumption charged to it, never a second place where stock is valued. "Company-wide" is just the special case of a single warehouse.

Commissary — a central prep-and-hold warehouse that produces prep items and supplies several restaurants — always by explicit transfer into each restaurant's consumption warehouse before any sale consumes the goods.

Taught in: Scope & locations.

Items and their policies¶

The rule that governs this whole cluster: an item's behavior never depends on its category, because categories are a free, user-extensible classification that a customer can rename or translate. Behavior keys off a few explicit policy fields and the facts derived from them; the category supplies only a code prefix and sensible defaults.

Item (inventory item) — the one catalog identity for anything the business buys, holds, makes, uses, or sells: flour, a bottle of cola, a paper clamshell, a carbonara made to order, an hour of a meeting room, or an oven. Measurement, purchasing, recipes, accounting treatment, presentation and food attributes all attach to that spine. "Inventory item" is the full name; after this first definition the domain simply says item.

Archived item — an item set aside as a reversible soft-hide: it drops out of working lists and pickers; its history and every document and recipe that names it stay as they are, and it can be brought back. An item is usable the moment it's created — there is no separate draft or activation step. Separately, an item locks: accounting treatment stays fixed while a close in force has settled a fact that relied on them, and the base unit freezes once a movement, a sale, or a recipe has relied on it (see Recipe role). A product card freezes none of those facts; these locks protect operational meaning, not presentation.

Item merge — the absorption of a duplicate item into its surviving twin: the open period's rows and the duplicate's naming move to the survivor, while sealed periods stay with the absorbed card, which keeps a redirect stamp to where the identity went.

Accounting treatment — the stored choice of how an item's value is handled, which is the single switch that says how it behaves. Six values, in the ladder's own order: stock (the cost becomes an expense at consumption), small tools (at write-off), consumable (on receipt), counted consumable (on receipt, while a quantity book stays), fixed asset (over time, as depreciation), and phantom (never — the item is neither held nor bought, and consuming it spends its materials instead). It stays fixed while a close in force has settled history under it, because a period already told cannot be silently retold; while the reliance is still open, the books re-derive instead. Written in full it is the accounting treatment; on screen it is shortened to Accounting, with the full name in the hint.

Stock item — an item carried on the ledger: tracked, counted, and valued at the pool's price for the period (flour, beef). This is the stock accounting treatment, and "is it stocked?" is the master gate that many older one-off capability flags collapse into.

Consumable — an item expensed on receipt: its cost becomes an expense the moment it arrives, with no on-hand, no count, and no valuation (oil, salt, napkins). Why: tracking the on-hand of a pinch of salt costs more than it is worth.

Stock vs consumables — the two words the book keeps apart, because everyday speech uses "consumables" for both. Stock is goods carried on the ledger: walked, counted, valued, and settled at a close. Consumables are exactly the goods expensed at the door, whose cost lands the day they arrive while no value lands on the balance. A plain consumable is never counted and can show neither an overage nor a shortage; a counted consumable keeps a quantity book beside the settled money. Why the line matters: a period reports what consumables cost but never a money gap for them, because no value claim exists to disagree with.

Counted consumable — an item that keeps a quantity book while its full cost is its own expense on receipt (gloves, cleaning chemicals, printed menus). Receiving posts the quantity into its pool at zero value. The book answers how many are left: counted, transferred, wasted, and settled at the close like stock, with a par level able to watch it. Recipes cost it at its reference price and never draw it down; internal consumption may draw it down directly at zero value, but it can never be a sale. The variance report never reads it — a variance is a money instrument, and this book carries none. Why a find needs no guard: the cost was expensed once and can never be expensed again, so a surplus enters at zero — the only value it could ever have.

Small tool — a durable tool of the trade (a frying pan, a knife, a gastronorm tray): too long-lived to be a consumable, too cheap to depreciate. The treatment that expenses a unit on write-off: purchases accumulate in a per-warehouse pool of quantity and value, nothing drains through sales, and the cost is recognized only when a unit breaks, is lost, or a count finds it gone — into the small-tool write-off bucket, never cost of goods. A count may also find more than the book claims, and the sighting stands; the surplus is put right by entering the receipt that paid for it, never by an overage (see Overage). In one phrase: a fixed asset with zero depreciation, kept out of the asset register.

Fixed-asset item — an item routed to the fixed-asset side of the house: the treatment that capitalizes each unit when received, then depreciates it over its life (an oven, a mixer). The item is still bought through an ordinary purchase order and goods receipt, like anything else.

Phantom — the treatment that says the axis does not apply: the item never materializes, being neither held nor purchased, so there is nothing of its own to account for — no balance, no valuation, no receipt. Three things ask for it and all do the same thing: a sale, an internal use — the staff meal, the plate cooked for a photograph — and a write-off — the plate made and thrown away. Each explodes the item's recipe through it into materials, and only those materials are accounted; a period's reconciliation shows them separately, as one mechanism. Every phantom owns a recipe and is never tracked; dishes and services are exactly this. Why the value exists: the alternative is pretending a carbonara is bought. Where the word comes from: the phantom assembly of manufacturing — a part that exists only long enough to be exploded into its components.

Service — a made-to-order item whose recipe may be empty: a meeting-room hour, a photo session, a delivery fee, a consulting call. Sold like any dish and recorded in full; the empty recipe is the author's statement that the sale uses nothing up, so the cost of that sale is a known zero rather than an unknown one. Where a service does consume in proportion to the sale — two coffees per booking — those are ordinary recipe lines. Where it does not — the floor cleaned every evening — the consumption is internal, not attached to any sale. Services is one of the starting categories, carrying that preset.

Storage condition — the stored default condition for shelf-life policy: ambient, chilled, or frozen. It is copied from the category at item creation and used when a receiving use-by date is derived.

Packaging item — an item with the packaging recipe role: placeable on a recipe's packaging lines, with its cost always in a separate bucket from food cost. It is a stock item — cups and clamshells are real countable stock that depletes as made-to-order items sell, and the packaging bucket is priced from that book. Example: a kraft clamshell rides a recipe's packaging line and costs into packaging, keeping the food-cost percentage honest.

Producible item — an item that has a recipe of its own — the answer to what one batch, or one sale, uses up (dough, a carbonara, a meeting-room hour). On screen the role reads own recipe, which is all it claims: "made in-house" would be a lie about a room. It is the candidate flag only; whether a recipe yet exists is a separate fact. Only two treatments carry it — stock, where the recipe fires at a production run, and phantom, where it fires at the sale, the internal use or the write-off.

Receiving routes by treatment — the rule that any item that materializes may appear on a purchase order or a goods-receipt line; there is no separate "procurable" switch. What the received line does is routed by the item's accounting treatment — into stock, straight to expense, or to the fixed-asset branch. A phantom is the one refusal, and it comes from the same treatment rather than a switch of its own: nothing of it ever arrives, so an order or a receipt naming one is refused, and the purchase list leaves such a row unplanned. Why: buying is otherwise universal; only the accounting consequence differs.

Prep item — an in-house intermediate that is both made and stocked and has its own recipe — a batch of dough, a base sauce, peeled carrots (formally, a semi-finished good). It is what you get when a producible item is also stocked. Why it earns a name: a stocked prep item stops the recipe explosion (below), because it was already made and costed once.

Recipe role — the policy fact saying what an item may be inside a recipe: exactly one of none, ingredient (an atom line that never decomposes), producible (a made thing with its own recipe), or packaging (rides out with the dish in packaging rows); recipe lines are gated by it. Once the item is wired into a recipe, the role may change only to one that wiring still accepts, and the same wiring freezes the item's base unit. Why one exclusive choice: an item can't be both a leaf and a branch of the costing tree. The gate and the freezes in full: Item model & policies §5.

Decomposing intermediate — a producible item that is never held in stock: a named sub-recipe (a house spice mix) that dishes reference as one tidy line, while costing and consumption pass through to its components as if the dish had listed them directly. Why it earns a name: its stocked counterpart, the prep item, stops the recipe explosion; the decomposing intermediate is the same role with the opposite behavior, told apart purely by is-stocked.

Valuation is independent of the recipe role — the rule that an item's accounting treatment has nothing to do with what it may be in a recipe (the role's question). An expensed ingredient contributes to a recipe's theoretical cost at a reference price but stays out of counts and out of actual-usage variance. Why: coupling the two would drag an expensed item back into full valuation — the exact tangle the policy fields exist to prevent.

Reference price — the standing price (last purchase, or a set standard) at which a non-stocked ingredient is costed into a recipe, since it has no pool price of its own. Example: salt, expensed at receipt, still adds its few cents to a dish's theoretical cost at reference price.

Price policy — the item-level rule that chooses how an item's reference price is found: automatic (the newest market fact seen), pinned (follows one chosen supplier product until unpinned), manual (a hand-typed price), or stock price (what the item's own stock is worth on average). A policy that cannot resolve reads as unpriced, loudly, never silently falling back. Why on the item, not the finished product: a price is a fact about an input, so steadying it once protects every recipe that uses it. How each setting behaves: Catalog §5.

Manual price — a price a human types for an item from their own knowledge ("blueberries run about €12/kg") — a single current value, not a history, for when no purchasing record exists yet or to override noisy ones. It feeds reference cost only and never values stock. Distinct from an automatically resolved reference price — the last-purchase-or-standard fallback a consumable ingredient is costed at; a manual price is a deliberate human override.

Taught in: Item model & policies.

Units of measure¶

Unit — a measure: how much of something there is — a kilogram, a liter, a piece — carrying no price and no supplier. A unit scoped to a single item may also stand for the bundle that item comes in (a 25 kg sack, a case of 6 × 2 kg), then additionally carrying that bundle's barcode and an optional photo; structurally it is still just a per-item unit with a ratio to base, measured and converted like any other — only how a vendor prices it lives elsewhere (a supplier product, below). Conversion happens only within a single dimension (mass, volume, or count), never across.

Dimension — the family a unit belongs to: mass, volume, or count. The boundary across which the system refuses to auto-convert, because turning liters into kilograms needs a density it does not assume. (The blessed workaround is an item-scoped mass measure — "a cup of this flour = 120 g" — a deliberate, per-item, operator-owned factor, never an implicit conversion.)

Base unit — the single canonical unit of an item's dimension (grams for mass, milliliters for volume, pieces for count), in which every stored quantity and every unit cost for that item is expressed. Why one base unit: it is the common denominator that lets the accounting core do arithmetic without thinking about which unit a quantity was keyed in.

Base-unit immutability — the rule that an item's base unit freezes once it has its first stock movement, because it is the denominator of every stored quantity and cost; changing it would silently rescale history.

Stock unit (unit of issue) — the per-item unit a human naturally counts, issues, and reads an item in: kilograms for flour, pieces for buns. It pre-fills entry on counts, write-offs, and production outputs, and always converts to the base unit on posting. Why separate from the base unit: the base unit is the machine's denominator and must stay fixed; the stock unit is the human's pen and can change freely.

Pricing unit — a per-item choice of the measure to read prices in, so a supplier's quote is shown on a legible, comparable basis: butter per 100 grams, flour per kilogram, oil per liter. It changes nothing but the display — the price itself stays attached to each supplier product, and the figure shown is simply that product's cost re-expressed in the pricing unit. Its only job is to let two suppliers' products in different units be compared at a glance ("which butter is cheaper per 100 g?") instead of as an unreadable price per gram. Left unset, prices read in the base unit.

Standard units — the company-shared seeded dictionary of ten units (grams, kilograms, ounces, pounds; milliliters, liters, fluid ounces, quarts, gallons; pieces), laid down once per company and server-protected so a standard unit's factor can never be edited — every one is a universal physical constant. A company may hide the standards it doesn't use (an EU kitchen hiding oz/lb/qt/gal): hiding only removes the unit from pick-lists for new entries — anything already referencing it keeps converting — and the canonical bases (g, ml, pcs) can never be hidden. A bundle you buy in — a 25 kg sack, a case of 6 × 2 kg — is not a separate kind of thing either: it is simply a per-item unit that also carries a barcode.

Custom unit — a company-shared measure an operator adds to the dictionary for vocabulary with no universal definition (a baker's dozen, a tray of 30, a house scoop) — the same company-wide scope as a standard unit, but operator-owned and editable (rename, re-factor, retire) until a document first references it. Why lb/qt/gal are standard, not custom: they are physical constants, and an editable constant is a typo away from corrupting every quantity entered through it.

Supplier product — the optional catalogue line that prices one item for one supplier, bought in a chosen unit: how you buy this item from this vendor, and at what. It references an item and the unit it is priced in — a per-item bundle (the Case 6 × 2 kg) or a plain measure (apples priced per kg) — and carries the commercial terms (the price, the minimum order quantity, the lead time) together with the recognition keys that let a line read off the supplier's paper be matched to it: the supplier's code (their printed article number) plus the free-text descriptions it has used before, learned over time. It also accumulates the price history the anomaly checks read. It is never required to record a purchase — a cash or market receipt carries an item, a unit, and a price with no supplier product at all — and the same item bought from two vendors, or priced two ways by one vendor (per sack and per pallet), is simply two lines. A freshly imported line may sit unresolved — naming a supplier and the supplier's own words for what it sells and in what (a code too, when known) but no item or unit yet — until someone matches it, and the two match independently: the item can be pinned down before the unit is (you know it's this flour before you've worked out whether the line means the sack or the pallet), but the unit can only be matched once its item is known, since a unit is only ever valid for one item. Example: "Baker's Supply sells flour as a Case 6 × 2 kg at €18.00, 1-case minimum, 2-day lead."

Convert-to-base (the boundary rule) — the rule that no quantity enters the ledger except after conversion to the item's base unit, at the moment of posting. Why: keep the unit-juggling at the edge and the entire accounting core stays unit-agnostic, working only in base-unit decimals.

Taught in: Units of measure.

Costing¶

Cost of goods sold (COGS) — the value of everything consumed by selling over a period, assembled at the close with shrinkage inside it: the period aggregate, split into food and packaging buckets at the financial boundary. A month has a COGS; a single dish has a plate cost (see Labor and payroll). The two meet only when dishes sell.

Weighted-average cost (WAC) — the costing method where an item's unit cost is the value-weighted average of everything received into its cost pool. The right choice for fungible, commingled food, where tracking which exact kilogram of flour you used is fiction. Example: a pool opens the period with 10 kg at €2.00/kg and receives 10 kg at €3.00/kg → the period's price is €50.00 ÷ 20 kg = €2.50/kg.

Average cost (AVCO) — the accounting synonym for weighted-average cost; used interchangeably.

Period price — the one unit cost a pool carries for an accounting period: opening value plus the value of everything that came in, over opening quantity plus the quantity that came in, struck at the close. Every movement of the period that took stock out is worth its quantity at that price. Why one figure: it makes what the period cost independent of the order the paperwork was entered in.

Provisional price — the unit cost a pool quotes while its period is still open: the period-price ratio struck over what the period has seen so far — what the pool opened with plus what has come in, over the same quantities. An issue's provisional value is its quantity at that price. Later arrivals move it, and the close restates it a last time. Why an estimate at all: cooking cannot wait for the close, and a figure that says it is provisional is more useful than one that waits.

Late value news — value learned about a period that has already closed: a sending warehouse striking its price after the receiver sealed the day a transfer's goods landed. It is recorded in the receiving warehouse's open period, where it dilutes that period's price, or becomes price-difference expense where there is no stock to attach it to.

Item-cost point — an append-only, dated statement of what a deterministically composed producible item costs under two views: reference prices chosen by each input's price policy and the weighted-average value of stock the recipe would consume. A matrix has no single honest point; its concrete builds are priced when needed. The point records food and packaging cost, recipe and date — never selling price or margin. A stocked product's sale still uses its warehouse pool cost.

Reference cost vs stock valuation — reference cost says what an item costs to make on the stated date, pricing each leaf at the reference chosen by its price policy; stock valuation follows the warehouse averages of stock actually held. The first preserves an operational costing judgment, while the second is the book fact used when consumption posts.

Replacement cost — pricing a recipe's ingredients and packaging at what they would cost to re-buy on a chosen date, using the market facts known for each. A made-in-house prep is costed by looking through to the materials it is made from. Those dated facts make replacement cost derivable when needed; it is not part of item-cost history.

Quantity is independent of value — the load-bearing decoupling (see valuation layer): a transfer between your own warehouses moves quantity at no net change in value, and the arriving value simply joins the receiving warehouse's pool and its period price.

Landed cost — the full cost placed on a goods-receipt line: the line's subtotal (quantity × price, less any discount), plus its share of freight and handling allocated by value, plus that line's non-recoverable tax. The receipt movement carries this net figure, not the bare line price, because freight and non-recoverable tax are genuinely part of what the stock cost you. Example: €100 of beef + €8 freight share + €0 non-recoverable tax → landed cost €108.

Recoverable input VAT — value-added tax a business can reclaim from the tax authority on its purchases, so it is not part of inventory cost: stock is valued net of it and the tax becomes money owed back to the business. The EU case (Portugal first). Example: €100 of ingredient + €23 recoverable VAT → stock valued at €100, with €23 sitting separately as a receivable.

Non-recoverable tax — tax that cannot be reclaimed and is therefore folded into that line's cost as part of landed cost. The US case sets recoverable tax to zero, so net equals cost and one code path serves both regions.

Gross vs net (payable vs capitalized) — the two money totals on a receipt: the gross is what you owe the supplier; the net is what feeds the valuation. Why it matters: the average must be built on the net value — capitalizing the gross would quietly overstate what stock is worth.

Negative book — a pool the recorded issues drove below zero, because a sale or a transfer was recorded before the delivery behind it. The fact is recorded rather than refused, and the deficit stays visible until a receipt lifts it or a count walks the item; a find that covers it carries no value, like any find. It blocks the warehouse's close until then (see close-blocker).

Taught in: Costing & valuation.

Recipes and production¶

Pad — a company-wide working surface for notes, tables, checklists, images, and links to the company's operational records, arranged across ordered sheets. Editing a Pad helps people and their assistant organize work but does not itself move stock or change another business record. A Pad holds one version of itself at a time, and an edit that began from a version someone has since moved past is refused rather than written silently over their work. A checklist entry on a Pad is a task rather than a line of text: it carries what is to be done, an optional short value beside it — a quantity, a status, a time, whoever it falls to — and an optional written body for the detail that would crowd the row. What is written in that body is the author's; how much of its formatting is shown is the editor's decision, not the record's.

Saved list — a company-wide reusable plan with optional authored name and ordered sections for items or exact recipe versions. A section's authored title is optional; entries may carry quantity, unit, note, free text and attachments, but the list has no workflow or stock effect. A production calculation may copy its material plan into one and a goods receipt may cite one.

Recipe — the company's preparation knowledge for a made item, historically also called a tech card. It holds ingredients, packaging and output facts, preparation steps, photos, notes, and the evidence read by food-attribute rules. Each version preserves the composition relied on by dated operations.

Line presence — whether an ordinary recipe line is fixed (always in), removable (in unless taken out), or addable (out unless chosen). Presence belongs to the recipe because it changes what is made, not how the menu sells it.

Slot — a named choice place in a recipe matrix, such as milk or protein, with candidates and selection bounds: how few and how many of them one dish can carry, in the same from–to words a modifier group speaks. Exactly-one is the classic radio; a zero minimum makes "none" a legal dish; a wider maximum lets candidates combine. One candidate may be marked the canonical pick shown before anyone chooses — a truth for the eye, never seated by resolution; the commercial choice, if any, belongs to the menu.

Candidate — one item or owned sub-recipe that can fill a slot, with the amount and technique the recipe requires. A sub-recipe candidate lets alternatives differ by method as well as ingredients.

Matrix — a made-to-order recipe that records everything the item can be: fixed, removable, and addable lines plus slots and their candidates. A matrix is never a stocked prep card; one with slots is also never a component inside another recipe, because neither context has anybody resolving a customer choice.

Build — the final recipe for one concrete set of choices: seated candidates, included addable lines, excluded removable lines, and any chosen multipliers. It is what the cook reads and what costing and stock explosion consume.

Base build — the deterministic build used when nobody supplied a choice: fixed and removable lines remain, addable lines stay out, and slots stay empty. Internal consumption and menu-detached sales use it rather than guessing.

Recipe owner — the single item a recipe makes. A version may be built without an owner, but it must name one item before it can go on the schedule. Its own name and reference identity keep it findable without borrowing the item's, while one owner gives production, sale explosion and dated actuality the same answer about what the recipe makes.

Bill of materials (BOM) — the canonical name for a recipe's component list — a tree of component + quantity + unit. A recipe's structured ingredients form a bill of materials (the recipe itself carries more — see Recipe); those ingredient rows are the bill's lines.

Recipe explosion (BOM explosion) — walking a recipe's tree down to the items a made-to-order sale, internal use or write-off actually consumes. The walk stops at anything already stocked and continues through made-to-order components. Why: a sold made item has to become depletions of flour, beef, oil, and so on to drive both theoretical usage and cost without consuming the same prep twice.

Date-correct explosion — exploding against the recipe that was in effect on the sale's business date — picking the version active on that day, walking its frozen tree, and pinning that version onto each consumption so the historical cost is reproducible. Why: costing a sale against today's recipe when the recipe has since changed would give the wrong number.

Explosion stops at a stocked prep item — the rule that the walk halts when it reaches a stocked prep item and depletes that prepped item one-for-one at its own cost, instead of carrying on down to the prep item's raw ingredients. Why: the prep item was already made and costed once; re-exploding it would double-count and would ignore the batch already in stock.

Yield (edible-portion vs as-purchased) — the gap between what you bought and what is usable after prep: as-purchased (AP) is the whole, unpeeled invoice quantity; edible-portion (EP) is what survives trimming and peeling. Costing at the as-purchased price systematically understates food cost — the classic mistake this domain avoids. Example: an as-purchased carrot at €1.00/kg yielding 81% really costs about €1.23/kg of usable carrot.

Emergent yield — the fact that yield is not a number anyone types in; it falls out of a prep item's own recipe as output weight ÷ total ingredient weight. Example: 124 g of whole carrots peeled down to 100 g gives a yield of 100 ÷ 124 = 81%, read straight off the "peeled carrots" recipe — there is no separate yield field.

Prep-item unit cost — the cost a prep item carries into the dishes that use it: its total ingredient cost divided by its output, which embeds the yield (less output from the same ingredients means a higher unit cost). Example: €1.00 of whole carrots ÷ 0.100 kg of peeled output = €10.00/kg of peeled carrot.

Production (the move-pair) — making a prep item expressed as two ordinary movements: consume the ingredients storage location → production, then yield the finished item production → storage location, with the ingredients' cost rolling into the output. It posts the rows recorded on the session — cost = recorded ingredients ÷ recorded output — while the recipe stays the standard those rows were filled from and are measured against. Both legs meet at the storage location the session names — its production floor: the ingredients leave that floor and the yield lands back on it. Why it needs no special machine: manufacturing is just the movement engine plus a recipe.

Production loss — what a shift took off the floor beyond what its batches' composition rows account for, posted on its own as storage location → stock loss. Why it is not batch cost: the excess left the floor and no output absorbed it, so charging it to the prep would raise the unit cost of every dish built on it. Because someone measured and recorded it, it is an explained loss — the close treats it like documented waste, never as unexplained shrinkage.

Trim-loss — the prep loss that is handled implicitly: because the output weighs less than the ingredients, their full cost rolls into the smaller output, raising its unit cost. Booking the trim explicitly to scrap is a later refinement.

Theoretical-vs-actual (AvT) — the central food-cost variance comparison. Theoretical usage is what should have been consumed — sales multiplied through the recipe explosion. Actual usage is what the count says was really depleted. The variance is theoretical minus actual, in quantity, money, and percent. Example: theoretical flour use 100 kg, counted actual use 108 kg → variance 8 kg.

Unexplained variance — the operationally important number left after you subtract logged waste from the total variance: the part that points at over-portioning, theft, or mis-invoicing. Example: an 8 kg variance with 3 kg of logged waste leaves 5 kg unexplained.

Taught in: Recipes & production.

Procurement¶

Requisition — loose buying intent captured for the formal purchasing lane, before it is resolved into orders. It is a header-plus-lines document like the order, and equally pre-ledger (it never moves stock), but deliberately unresolved — a line need only name something (a catalog item or free text), and its quantity, unit, needed-by date, and warehouse are all optional. It is the third, manual source of demand beside the two automatic feeders (par reorder points and the forecast cascade): the only one a human authors by hand, which Plan it turns into supplier orders. Its life is open → closed, with cancelled to abandon it. Example: a week's running list the buyer plans into purchase orders across several vendors.

Plan it — the action that turns a requisition into real orders. It runs the order-shaping half of the procurement engine — resolve each line to a supplier and a unit, round up to whole units and the minimum order quantity, group one draft order per supplier — but skips netting by default: a hand-written quantity is taken at face value (ask for 101 eggs, order enough whole units for 101 eggs). Subtracting on-hand is an opt-in; with it on, a line is reduced by what is already on hand and on order, and a line that comes out fully covered is marked covered and ordered as nothing. Lines that can't be planned (no firm item, no quantity, an unconvertible unit, no warehouse) or can't be sourced (no supplier product) are surfaced for the operator, never silently dropped.

Requisition line state — the stage of one requisition line: open (captured, still awaiting a decision — free-text or quantity-less lines may linger here indefinitely), planned (turned into a draft purchase-order line by Plan it, and linked to it — a planned line refuses edits and removal until that draft releases it, and deleting the draft line before it is ordered reverts the line to open), covered (netting found enough already on hand and on order, so nothing was ordered — reachable only via the opt-in subtract-on-hand; changing what or how much a covered line asks re-opens it, because the verdict described the ask it was given), or dropped (set aside as no longer wanted).

Purchase order (PO) — a commitment document: a promise to buy, which never itself moves stock. It is a commercial fact — supplier, goods, quantities, prices — and names no destination; where the goods land is the goods receipt's to state, line by line. Example: "order 50 kg of flour from Acme" is a purchase order; the flour actually entering stock is a later goods receipt. It has a six-state lifecycle (see purchase-order fulfillment state).

Purchase-order fulfillment state — the stage of a purchase order's life: draft → ordered → partially received → received or over-received, with cancelled available throughout. The three receipt states are derived from the posted goods-receipt links, never set by hand: an order is received once every line has arrived within tolerance, partially received while any line is still short, and over-received when every line is met and at least one line arrived above its order (beyond tolerance). One rule settles the mixed case — still-short always wins: if any line is under-delivered the order stays partially received however far another line ran over. Both received and over-received are finished (no further edit or cancel).

Goods receipt — the document that books goods arriving, with a quantity and a cost: it runs the per-line landed-cost calculation and posts supplier → storage location movements, each line to the storage location its goods went to, so one delivery may span two warehouses (see placement decides the books; a capitalized asset line routes by receiving routes by treatment). It is typed by hand or read off any supplier paper (see scan), may name no supplier at all, and answers to at most one supplier paper, whose prices become the receipt's value (see Procurement §6).

Delivery note — the paper (or PDF) the goods physically arrive with, listing their quantities and prices; one kind of supplier paper a goods receipt can be entered or scanned from.

Scan (scanned receipt) — building a draft goods receipt by reading a photo or PDF of any supplier paper that lists the goods — an invoice, a till receipt, a delivery note — instead of typing it. What the paper printed stays beside the receipt, and comparing the two only catches a misread. It identifies the supplier by name (creating a new supplier if none matches), auto-fills the lines whose printed code or description exactly matches what that supplier has used before — binding them to the right item and unit, and learning the match — and sets every other line aside for review. The read only ever produces a draft for a human to finish; it never posts.

Supplier paper / attachment — the two kinds of file a goods receipt keeps. A supplier paper lists the goods with their quantities and prices (a bill, a till receipt, a delivery note) and is what the receipt's lines are read from; an attachment is any other file (the goods, the boxes, a label), kept as evidence and never read. The invoice and the till receipt are the supplier's bill, the paper that charges for the goods.

Extracted line awaiting review — a line read off a supplier paper that the system would not auto-bind: a product it can't confidently place, one never seen from this supplier, or a credit/return. It holds what was read (description, quantity, price, and the source file, page, and exact place on that page) plus, when confident, a suggestion to confirm an existing item or create a new one — a prompt for a human, never a binding. The operator applies it (turning it into a real receipt line, creating the item or unit first if new) or dismisses it; either way it leaves the list. A draft cannot post while any such line remains, so a readable-but-unplaced line can never silently drop its stock.

Recorded price (price history) — what a supplier product has actually cost, learned from the receipts that posted it or from a direct correction when purchasing knows better (re-quoted by the vendor, or a catalogue re-import). Each one adds to the same history; the product carries its current price and a typical price — the middle value of its recent history, so a single mistaken posting cannot drag the figure off.

Pack-jump guard — the sanity check on a scan: an auto-fill is trusted only while the paper's per-unit price stays near the product's typical recorded price (a recent purchase, or the originally seeded price if it has never been bought). A large jump usually means the unit the line was billed in changed, not the price — a ten-piece box read against the single piece — so the line is set aside for review instead of silently booking a tenth of the stock at ten times the cost. When the jump is a clean whole-number multiple (a box priced at exactly ten times the piece), the review line carries a one-click proposal to record the larger unit (a per-item bundle); an uneven multiple (catch-weight produce) is left for the operator to resolve by hand.

Catch-weight — goods sold by a weight that varies per delivery rather than in a fixed bundle: a side of beef, a wheel of cheese, loose produce weighed at the counter. The supplier prices them per measure (per kilogram); the unit is that measure itself, and a received line carries the actual weight that arrived (5.945 kg, not "one case"). The weight is the quantity — there is no fixed bundle to convert — so the ledger books exactly what the scale read.

Par / reorder point — a per-item, per-warehouse minimum-and-maximum level that drives reordering. Only items with a countable book get a par — stock and counted consumables; plain consumables and fixed-asset items can be ordered but only by adding them by hand. Example: flour par at the dry store is a minimum of 20 kg and a maximum of 80 kg.

Replenishment rule — the stored record of a par level: the minimum and maximum quantities for one item at one warehouse, expressed in the item's base unit. One rule per item-and-warehouse pair; the netting engine reads it automatically.

Netting — the subtraction step that makes a plan stock-aware: gross demand for an item minus the on-hand quantity at the relevant warehouse minus the quantity already committed on open purchase orders (those in Ordered or Partially received, and also Draft proposals standing from this run so a re-run does not duplicate them) equals the net need — the gap that still requires buying. Example: gross need 40 kg, on-hand 12 kg, open order 25 kg → net need 3 kg → round up to 1 × 25 kg sack. An order line counts as committed here when it was planned for this warehouse (see planned-for warehouse) or planned for nowhere at all.

Order ↔ receipt match — the buying control that ties the purchase order to the goods received: a derived comparison, line by line, of the quantity ordered with the quantity received, and of the amount the order committed with what the receipt says those goods were charged before tax and freight, within a small tolerance (a per-currency configuration default). A capitalized asset line participates like any other — the €4,500 oven is exactly the line worth matching. Walk-in receipts with no purchase order stay first-class — the link is optional.

Planned-for warehouse — the warehouse whose shortage a purchase-order line was drafted to cover, recorded on the line when a plan or a par level wrote it. It is provenance, not a deliver-to: nothing is placed by it, and a line somebody typed by hand carries none. Why netting reads a blank one as covering here: goods already coming are the more expensive thing to order twice.

Stock-aware procurement plan — the engine that proposes what to buy: it combines par-based reorder points with a demand forecast, nets against real on-hand and already-open orders, applies minimum-order and whole-unit rounding plus lead-time back-dating, and emits draft purchase orders grouped one per supplier. Why net against open orders: without it, the plan re-orders things already on the way.

Taught in: Procurement.

Sales and consumption¶

Sales ticket — the single front door through which every sale enters the stock side, no matter where it was born (a till, the app, a delivery platform, a spreadsheet, a photographed day sheet, a typed-in sale). It belongs to one restaurant and carries a business date stamped at the door in the restaurant's own local clock. Its lines are every line the customer was charged — the sales of stocked things and, beside them, the charges that stock nothing (a service charge, a delivery fee) — each with its money, so the ticket adds up to the document it came from. Stock reads the lines that sell stocked things, and a sale whose price nobody wrote down still depletes stock — an unknown price is never confused with the deliberate €0 comp. A ticket that should not exist is cancelled: its movements are taken back and its printed lines stay on record; one that happened but was written down wrong — its lines, its day, or its restaurant — is corrected in place while its period is open, the depletion moving with the correction. A ticket read off a document keeps what was read and where each row sat on the page, and a fresh reading of new files replaces both together with the lines they explain. Why one door: there is then one path to get right, not four.

One sale-line target and one verdict — a material sale line points at one item, while a charge that names nothing in the catalog carries the verdict sold nothing stocked. A stocked item depletes directly in a unit; a made-to-order item depletes through its dated recipe in portions — and a service, whose recipe may be empty, depletes nothing while remaining an ordinary recorded sale. The item's policies choose the behavior, so no second dish identity is needed.

Direct sale (material resale) — selling a stocked item as-is, whether or not it also has a recipe: a storage location → customer depletion in the sale's unit at the item's own cost. The stock unit supplies physical meaning when the source omits one; without either, the line waits. Its recipe matters at production, not when a bottle or stocked tray leaves one-for-one.

Eager posting — the rule that consumption is recorded the instant the sale comes through the door, not deferred to a month-end batch. Why: on-hand is correct the moment a sale happens, food cost is real all month, and a problem with one sale surfaces against that one sale instead of as an avalanche at the close.

Station — a shared kind of preparation work, such as kitchen or bar, named by made-to-order items. Each restaurant may map it to a storage location in its consumption warehouse.

Consumption routing (three-level fallback) — the source location chosen by a depleted-item exception, then the sold item's station, then the restaurant default, all inside its selected consumption warehouse. Sales and internal consumption share this routing; directly consumed stock is stationless.

Comp (€0 sale) — a comped plate, giveaway, or marketing tasting served to a customer, recorded as an ordinary sale line at zero price: the transaction happened, so no revenue but the full ingredient cost flows, to the customer side like any sale. Why no separate kind: the €0 price is the comp.

Internal consumption — a live event with no customer: stock depletes directly in a unit at value, a counted consumable depletes directly in a unit at zero value, and a made-to-order item explodes through its dated recipe in portions. Nothing on it waits to be settled, so saving it books it. It is never a sales-ticket line, so the business may use a counted consumable that can never be sold without implying a customer or revenue.

Consumption category — an entry in the small per-company vocabulary that names internal consumption in reports, each created pointing permanently at one of two destinations: eaten — a person consumed the food, it leaves to the customer side (a staff meal); or used up — consumed by the process, it leaves to scrap (a recipe test). Every company starts with Staff meal and R&D and reshapes the list; history keeps pointing at the category it was recorded under. Why a vocabulary, not a fixed list: what internal consumption is called is operator reality; where it goes is the only part the books need pinned.

Answering a sale again — replacing its answer and withdrawing its previous consumption while that draw remains open to correction. A late sale records revenue on its business date without drawing stock until that period is reopened.

Held line — a sales line whose target, dated recipe or required build choices are still unanswered. The ledger carries only what the line already knows; its money stays held revenue until the answer is complete.

Sold-name alias — a learned answer for a till's raw name, pointing to one catalog item, to one menu item, or to the verdict that the line sells nothing stocked; a direct-stock answer also carries the measure of one sold unit when needed, while a menu-item answer needs none — the menu item names its catalog item and the sale behavior fixes the measure. A lesson taught at the menu-item grain belongs to that menu and answers only sales attributed to a storefront serving it; the company-wide lesson answers the rest. Matching proceeds exact made-to-order item, learned alias or no-stock verdict, the names the served menu itself carries, then exact stocked item; only a person's confirmation is remembered, because a guess would silently miscost every future sale under that name.

Taught in: Sales & consumption.

Menus and storefronts¶

Channel (selling) — an entry in the small company-authored vocabulary naming a way sales reach the business — Glovo, Wolt, the hall — each carrying one fulfillment nature. It groups storefronts, prices whole marketplaces at once, and slices reporting; it is never a stock or valuation axis.

Fulfillment — the dine-in-or-delivery nature used to choose recipe packaging; delivery means packed to leave, including customer pickup. The channel supplies the default, while an order supplies its actual fulfillment. The menu never selects packaging; the recipe owns it (see Menus and storefronts).

Storefront — a named selling point: one restaurant selling through one channel under a name ("Nonna — Glovo"). A cheap recorded fact, never created automatically; a marketplace integration, where one exists, attaches to it from the side as a storefront sync.

Virtual brand — a brand that exists as a storefront's name: one restaurant selling on the same channel as "Nonna Pasta" and "Burger Bar" runs two storefronts, two menus, one warehouse. The model has no separate notion of a brand — naming is what distinguishes virtual brands, exactly as the marketplaces see them.

Storefront sync — the optional record that a sales platform holds a copy of what a storefront serves: one per storefront, attached and detached freely, never a dependency of the menu. Pending means the current offer has not been acknowledged; what it delivers is the resolved document minus internal cost facts.

Sandbox provider — the sync's rehearsal seam: a provider that delivers nowhere and always accepts, so publish → pending → synced can be felt end to end without changing a customer-facing menu. It rehearses sending a menu out, where a sandbox integration rehearses orders coming in.

Channel integration — the company's own account at a marketplace platform, set up once with the keys that platform issued. Each of the account's stores is then linked to a storefront, and that store's orders arrive there.

Sandbox integration — a channel integration with no platform behind it: Sizl plays the marketplace itself, so there are no keys to enter. Test orders are placed on request from recorded samples and then travel the path a real platform's orders do — a rehearsal of receiving, cooking and handing over an order that no customer placed. It carries no menu anywhere, which is the sandbox provider's rehearsal.

Managed / manual change — what Noir can do for one sales platform about one kind of change (the menu, an 86, a pause, the working hours, the busy state). Managed: Noir carries it there. Manual: someone repeats it in the platform's own back office.

Pause — a restaurant stops taking external orders for a while, until a moment or until resumed: on every external channel, or only for the delivery or the pickup of its own online store. It never refuses an order a marketplace already took and never touches the dining room.

Kitchen busy — a restaurant state that adds minutes to what the kitchen promises, until a moment or until cleared.

Working hours — a restaurant's weekly windows in its own local time. A window ending earlier than it starts crosses midnight and belongs to the day it starts on; no windows at all means closed for its own online ordering.

Modifier group — a reusable set of customer choices from the company library («Milk», «Toppings»): an ordered list of options plus selection bounds — a minimum above zero makes the group required. Product cards attach groups; a menu amends the attachment per menu item, for display and price only.

Option (modifier) — one customer choice in a modifier group: a name, a signed price delta, the catalog item it talks about where the choice has stock meaning, and what it does — choose, remove, sell on the side, or replace the menu target. It never owns a recipe quantity; amounts and technique stay in recipes.

Option referent — the catalog item an option talks about. Item identity is the only bridge between the commercial choice and the recipe matrix.

Option kind — what the option does to its referent: choice selects or includes it, removal takes it out, add-on sells it as a separate product, and variant sells it instead of the menu target.

Text-only option — a choice with no catalog referent, affecting presentation or price but not the recipe build or stock.

Standard configuration — the representative sold configuration a menu item's defaults describe, as the card declares and the menu item may re-pick. The defaults first determine the sold item — the target unless a variant replaces it. A made-to-order sold item resolves to a recipe build; a stocked one costs from its pool. Storefronts present the configuration first and menu food cost uses it, but it is never a production instruction or a default stored in the recipe. The same sold item supplies the row's item-stop verdict; non-default variants do not substitute for it.

Included allowance — how many chosen options carry no charge, declared where a card attaches a group («3 toppings included»); which chosen options it covers is settled where the basket is priced.

Availability window — days of week plus a start and end time, crossing midnight when the end is earlier ("Friday 22:00–02:00"); a menu item's windows only narrow its section's, and empty means always. Data on the document; evaluated only in the storefront view, in the restaurant's own timezone.

Marketing label — a customer-facing badge on a menu item: a shared meaning from the company's tag vocabulary ("Vegan", "Spicy"), or a one-off authored string living on that menu item alone.

Placement — the mapping rule that puts a published menu on sale: it targets a whole channel or one storefront, the storefront-grain rule beats the channel-grain one, and each exact target carries at most one. The price band and the per-menu-item override sheet (price, hidden, photos) ride the placement at either grain.

Price band — a placement's uplift ratio plus a rounding rule (step and ending) applied to menu prices; rounding snaps strictly upward to the grid, never below the band, so the uplift always covers what the channel costs. An explicit override price wins untouched.

Stop (86) — the act of taking one item off sale at one restaurant, optionally until a moment and scoped to specific channels (empty scope = all). Liveness is derived — neither cleared nor lapsed — and a stop is never erased; it shapes what storefronts show and never blocks a sale from posting.

Storefront attribution — the optional record on a sales ticket of which storefront it sold through: pure enrichment, freely corrected at any time, gating nothing. Channel reporting derives ticket → storefront → channel; the free-text source label is the fallback for unattributed history.

Taught in: Menus & storefronts.

Posting documents¶

Posting document — the layer that creates movements. Each is a header with lines, and its lifecycle turns on whether anything on it has to be settled before the books can be asked. Where something does — a receipt awaiting review, a prep session's arithmetic — the document opens as a draft, freely editable with no effect on the books, and posting is the separate gesture that emits the movements. Where nothing does — a sale, a write-off, an internal consumption, a transfer — saving it emits them. From then on both kinds behave alike: while the period stays open, editing the document restates its movements and cancelling withdraws them; while its period is closed, the document is settled and neither is possible. The stock count is the one exception: it emits nothing, so it has a life of its own (see stock count publication and completeness).

Close boundary — the line separating freely correctable open-period facts from the settled figures established by a close still in force. A period reopening withdraws that boundary deliberately while retaining the original close as history.

Stock count — a dated observation of one storage location that creates no movement: full answers for the complete location, and spot names only the items observed. Operating-stock counts state quantities; fixed-asset counts confirm identified units. The observation supports operational balances and, for a selected full count, closing evidence; see Period close §2.

Stock count publication and completeness — draft is unpublished working evidence; posted is an observation the operator has explicitly published for daily quantities; cancelled is retired evidence retained in history, whether previously draft or posted. Completeness is a separate, live judgment of coverage, so either a draft or a posted full count can be complete or incomplete. A close settles its opening and closing evidence without changing publication, and reopening releases that settlement while retaining the publication decision.

Count completeness — whether a stock count answers every item its scope requires and supplies valid evidence for that warehouse's stock. It follows the initial or preceding settled balance and dated business facts, not other count observations or the count's publication state. See Period close §2.

Who must be counted — the items carried at non-zero quantity by the preceding close or initial balances, together with items that moved at that storage location through the full count's date. Other full or spot observations do not determine this coverage, and an archived item still carried by the books still needs an answer. See Period close §2.

Pre-drawn count rows — the rows a count sheet supplies itself from the books: the room's items where the contour holds stock, the asset serials the register places there where it holds assets. They are an offer, not a fence: a serial the register has never heard of cannot be typed in, but anything it does know may be ticked, and a small-tool sighting the book never knew about is recorded like any other. Why the sheet supplies them: a walk should confirm what the books already claim without anyone retyping it.

Transfer — the dated document that hands goods, or a fixed asset, from one warehouse to another; nothing on it waits to be settled, so saving it books it. Stock rides two legs (storage location → transit → storage location), costed at the sending warehouse's price and joining the receiving warehouse's pool; an asset line names one identified unit and simply moves which books carry it, with no movement and no transit leg. One document carries one family and never a mix, because the contour on the receiving end admits a single class of item. It is also the commissary-distribution document: what a commissary preps for a restaurant reaches that restaurant's own warehouse this way. Why two legs for stock: goods in transit belong to neither end while they travel. Why a document for an asset: two warehouses' books change hands, so the change needs a date both closes can honor.

Wastage — the document that records waste (storage location → scrap), under reasons that include expired (see expiry write-off). Each line names the storage location the quantity came off, so one document may span warehouses. Nothing on it waits to be settled, so saving it books the loss.

Sale-consumption — the stock consequence derived from a sales ticket: a stocked item depletes directly, while a made-to-order item explodes through its dated recipe; both leave storage location → customer.

Production run — the document that records what a prep session produced: one document per session, one line per prep item made ("this morning: sauce 5 L, dough 12 kg"). It opens as a draft — the shift's working sheet, freely editable and with no effect on stock — and posting asserts the whole session at once, every line's move-pair (see production, the move-pair) or none, drawn from the production floor the session names and yielded back onto it — a draft naming no floor cannot post. A line's ingredients are written on the line itself: filled in from whatever version of the standard the operator picked — a half-written card is a perfectly good source, since the rows are a copy the moment they land — or typed by hand, which is how production is recorded before any card exists. Posting reads those rows and nothing else; no recipe is consulted at the end. A posted session is corrected by correcting its sheet, for as long as its period is open. Why a draft: the cook who writes the sheet is rarely the person who signs it off.

Made inline — a prep that a production session made in the same batch from its own raws instead of taking it off the shelf. The prep's row stays on the sheet as the operator's declaration, with the raws beneath it; the row itself is never consumed — its raws are what leaves stock. See production run.

Input (prep session) — what a shift took off the floor, recorded at document level ("flour, 12 kg total"). It is the session's consumption fact: posting draws it and nothing else. Per item it must balance against the rest of the sheet — what was taken is what the batches absorb plus what was lost — so an item taken beyond what the composition rows account for is production loss in the excess, an item taken that no composition names is loss in full, and rows the input does not cover leave the session unpostable until the shift's own figures agree. Why it is stated rather than assumed: a plan is not an event, and a shift that worked exactly to its rows can say so in one gesture.

Accepted loss (prep session) — the shift's answer to what its session would write off, given item by item before it can post; a session that lost nothing is never asked. It is compared against the arithmetic rather than held as a standing permission, so a later re-weighing that moves the loss asks again. Why it is asked at all: value leaving the books should never be the by-product of a mistyped weight.

Taught in: Stock ledger, Period close.

Period close and reconciliation¶

Accounting period — the close calendar, kept per company and warehouse, so each warehouse closes its own books on its own calendar in its own timezone. Why per-warehouse: a shared commissary and a restaurant's own warehouse may run on different clocks.

Close policy — a warehouse's declared close cadence: on demand, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual. It is a hint, never a gate — it says where the next boundary falls so a close date can be pre-filled and a due period flagged, while closing stays a deliberate act and any date remains legal. The offered day is also the yardstick a finished close is read against — sealed on it, on time; before it, early; after it, late — three labels describing what happened, none of them a permission, and the calendar never shifts underneath them. On demand is the count-to-count rhythm: no calendar boundary, and the date offered is that of the warehouse's latest full count. A warehouse holding only fixed assets, set to annual, is how the traditional yearly asset walk is expressed.

Close boundary (the date the accountant names) — the day the period ends: the only date a close takes from the accountant. A seated full count asserts at it whatever day it was walked, and the corrections post dated it. Why the accountant names it: a closing walk's own date is information for judging whether it is fresh enough to trust, never a term in the sums.

Period start — the warehouse's opening date for its first period, then the day after the preceding close. It follows from the books' existing boundary rather than being chosen separately for each close.

Period close — the settlement of a warehouse's chosen interval against the counts and differences the accountant approved. It establishes the closing balance and period price, including the shortages and overages needed to reconcile the book to the counts, and preserves the evidence for that result.

Period reopening — the controlled withdrawal of one warehouse's latest close still in force, returning its span to reconciliation. Earlier closes become eligible as their successors are withdrawn one at a time. Business facts and the history of each close remain; eligibility depends on dependencies and recoverable evidence.

Reversed close — a close whose settlement no longer governs the books but whose original result and evidence remain historical facts. Its reversal records who withdrew it, when, and why.

Replacement close — a new settlement of a reopened span, related to the closes it replaces. Its dates may differ: one monthly close can replace several weekly closes.

Acceptance — approval of an item's exact signed difference at one storage location. It is a decision, not a posting; the close settles it, and it remains valid while the row's difference still equals the accepted one.

Period adjustment — an explained correction to a warehouse's quantities or inventory value, established for the period without asserting an exact operational event date. It follows the chosen closing boundary and affects reconciliation until the close posts it, separately from accepted residual count differences. See Period close §4.

Unreconciled variance — an item whose gap between the chosen count and the live book, at one location, is non-zero and nobody has accepted; recomputed live, never stored, melting as journal fixes land. Its twin is a stale acceptance: an approval whose row's difference has since moved, including back to zero. Both need settlement before closing.

Closing snapshot (period snapshot) — the preserved quantities and values established by a particular close. They supply the next period's opening balance only while that close remains in force; reversal retains them as history.

Close audit — the preserved evidence and results of a particular close: quantities and accepted differences by location, valuation by warehouse, receipt expenses, and asset verification. It explains what the close established using the facts and classifications it relied on at the time, including after the close is reversed.

Balances as of a date — what a warehouse held on a calendar day, quantity by storage location and value by pool. Closed periods supply their settled truth; open periods use the applicable book basis and subsequent movements. Dates before the warehouse's opening read the earlier journal.

Period-start boundary — the starting quantities and value from which a period is reconciled: the preceding close, or the warehouse's initial balances for its first period. Operational count observations do not replace that accounting starting point.

Opening date — the first day of the warehouse's books, shared by all its storage locations. Initial balances state what is held at the beginning of that day, so every movement dated that day belongs to the first period.

Book basis — an item's operational starting quantity at a storage location: the latest posted full or spot count that explicitly observed it, or otherwise the preceding close or initial balances. Subsequent movements supply the current quantity; an omitted item keeps its earlier basis and an explicit zero replaces it with zero. Publication, completeness and closing selection are distinct.

Spot count — the count scope for a list of items counted in one room on one day: once posted, it re-bases the running book for those items alone from its date, while an unlisted item keeps its basis. It carries no cost, is never seated, and is never evidence for a close. Why it exists: to keep the balances an operator orders and cooks against honest between closes, without closing.

Count selection (seat) — the warehouse's shared choice of the open period's boundary and of one full count per storage location as closing evidence, draft or posted, complete or incomplete, whose completeness is judged at that boundary. Its explicit observations support reconciliation while gaps remain; closing requires complete evidence, not operational publication. The choice remains until deliberately replaced or settled by the close.

Overage — the adjustment posted when a count finds more than the book claims: a stock loss → storage location movement that carries quantity and no value. A count establishes how much is there, never what it cost, so the found units join the period price's denominator and value is never born without a priced document (see initial balances). A small tool is the carve-out: its surplus is recorded on the sheet but posts no overage at all, because the found units take their quantity and their cost from the priced receipt that was never entered. A counted consumable's find enters at zero like any other, needing no guard.

Shortage — the adjustment posted when a count finds less than the book claims: a storage location → stock loss movement, valued at the period price like any other issue. It is the usual way theft, spoilage, and over-portioning enter the books, and valuing it is exactly what turns it into shrinkage inside cost of goods sold.

Over-receipt adjustment — the positive adjustment posted outside a count, when stock turns up before any count asserts it — for example, more goods physically arrived than the paperwork said. The count-derived case is the overage.

Untracked era — the recorded history before the warehouse's opening date. Initial balances summarize the stock carried from that history, and the first close settles the boundary differences. See Period close §4.

Initial balances — the warehouse's declared quantities by storage location and their costs at the beginning of its opening date; an empty declaration means zero. Each storage location starts manually, empty, or from a chosen full count whose quantities it follows while unsettled; costs remain a separate assertion. The opening is correctable only while no close remains in force; see Period close §4.

Reconciliation — bringing the running book into agreement with the truth: the count → accept → close flow plus the self-check below.

Self-check (tie-out) — the close invariant that the sum of the detailed inventory records equals the inventory control total, to the cent. The accounting name for the controlling-account guarantee.

Close-blocker — an unresolved condition that prevents a period from settling, such as missing required closing evidence, unapproved differences, inconsistent asset sightings or unresolved consumption. The complete conditions and their reasons belong to Period close §7.

Tick mismatch / tick conflict — the two close-blockers for fixed assets, and both are sightings the books have to answer. A mismatch is a chosen form ticking a unit the register places somewhere else — another room, another warehouse — or has already written off; the fix is the document the sighting implies, the transfer or the disposal, never a silent re-stamp. A conflict is two chosen forms ticking the same unit: both sightings are facts, so somebody has to settle which walk was right. An untick is a legitimate answer for the walk — "I looked, it is not here" — and the unit then derives as missing against the evidence the close trusts, never stored. Missing refuses the close like the other two: the unit is ticked at wherever it turns up, or disposed, before the period seals; until then it stays owned and keeps depreciating, and the loss is recognized only at disposal.

Restaurant profit-and-loss — a restaurant's result for the period, built by rolling up the consumption charged to it; the company result aggregates the warehouses and restaurants. It is a roll-up, not a second place stock is valued (see valuation grain vs profit grain).

Taught in: Period close.

Fixed assets¶

Fixed-asset sub-ledger — the separate, deliberately slim set of books for fixed-asset items, kept apart from the stock ledger: the asset register, straight-line depreciation, disposal, and the serial confirmation on a warehouse's count. Anything more — jurisdictional book/tax depreciation, alternative methods — belongs to the operator's accounting system, which receives the figures across the financial boundary.

Asset register — the list of the company's fixed assets, one row per identified unit (tracked by serial number): code, serial, capitalized cost, in-service date, the warehouse whose books carry it and since when, the storage location it is kept in, and status. A register entry is created when a fixed-asset item is received on an ordinary goods receipt (one unit per receipt line — each oven is its own row) or entered directly at onboarding for units already in service. A fixed-asset item is bought like anything else; only the accounting consequence differs: an asset entry, no stock movement. What the register is: the record of what the company owns — whose books carry each unit is a separate decision (see asset placement).

Asset status — where a unit is in its life: acquired (on the books, not yet depreciating), in service (the depreciation clock runs), or disposed (off the books). Three states and no fourth — an asset is either on the books or it is not. Placement is a separate axis: see asset placement.

Asset placement — which warehouse's books carry an identified unit and which room inside them it stands in, answered the moment the unit is registered and never blank after. Exactly two doors put a unit on a balance: a goods receipt, whose line names both, and hand registration, which requires the warehouse and defaults the room to that warehouse's main one. Both doors reach the same kind of books — a capitalized unit is admitted only where the register is kept. Afterwards only documents move it — an asset transfer to another warehouse's books, a relocation to another room within these (the register card's location edit is shorthand that mints exactly that document, dated the day of the save) — which is also how a misplacement is corrected. A unit leaves only by disposal. Why always a document: an undated change would move an asset out of a period that had already closed over it, and a walk that finds a machine in the wrong room deserves a record saying so.

Depreciation — spreading a capitalized asset's cost across its useful life, straight-line only, every eligible month posting exactly once and catching up automatically if a run was missed. Why straight-line only: anything fancier is the operator's accounting system's territory. The month-by-month arithmetic: Fixed assets §4.

Book value — the remaining carrying value of a fixed asset: capitalized cost minus accumulated depreciation. Derived from the register's posted entries; never stored as a separate figure, and never frozen by a close — so the figure for any date reconstructs from the record. Reaches zero (or salvage, if non-zero) when the asset is fully depreciated. What a warehouse's balance is depends on what it admits: stock pools plus the small-tools pool on an operating contour, the book value of the units its books carry on an asset one — and since every unit sits on exactly one warehouse's books, the warehouses together account for the whole register.

Disposal — retiring or selling a fixed asset, recognizing the gain or loss (proceeds minus book value at disposal date); this, not a stock movement, is how an asset leaves the books, and it is also one of the two answers when a walk cannot find a unit. Why: selling an oven is asset disposal, not stock leaving a storage location.

Asset serial confirmation — what a count is on the books that carry the register: one checkbox per asset those books hold, pre-drawn from the register, plus any unit the walker actually saw. The form is the roster and nothing else — there are no quantities on that contour to count. The sightings change nothing: a tick the register contradicts is a close-blocker, and a unit nobody ticked reads missing — refusing the close until somebody finds it or disposes it. Why here and not in a separate ritual: the warehouse that carries the books is the one the count walks, and its close policy already sets how often that happens.

Asset transfer — moving a fixed asset from one warehouse's books to another's: an asset line on an ordinary transfer document, dated, and legal only inside both warehouses' open periods. Posting hands over the books and assigns the receiving storage location (it named a place in the old warehouse); cancelling hands them back. Why not a field edit: an undated change would move an asset out of a period that had already closed over it.

Taught in: Fixed assets.

The financial boundary¶

Financial boundary — the line where the stock domain ends and the operator's accounting package (QuickBooks, Xero) begins: the system keeps no general ledger of its own and instead emits a small, fixed set of conceptual accounts for the books to import — inventory on-hand value, cost of goods sold split into food and packaging buckets, shrinkage, price-difference expense, input-VAT receivable, expense-on-receipt expense, small-tool write-off expense, depreciation expense, and gain or loss on asset disposal.

Taught in: Financial boundary.

Labor and payroll¶

Shift — the unit of worked time: one teammate, one restaurant, one business day, start to end minus unpaid break. The restaurant on the shift is the profit center the labor cost charges to — the same role it plays for a consumption movement.

Timesheet — the weekly per-restaurant approval envelope for shifts; approval freezes the hours inside it, making them the facts payroll reads (the labor counterpart of "count wins").

Employment terms — a teammate's pay, effective from a date: an hourly rate or a monthly salary in the company currency. A raise is a new row from a new date; rows are never edited, so any past payroll stays explainable from the terms in force then.

Payroll period / payroll run — the company-calendar period and the once-per-period run that turns approved hours into gross pay per teammate, refusing to post while deterministic blockers remain (an unapproved timesheet, a shift with no pay terms). Net pay, withholdings, and payslips belong to the operator's payroll provider — the same boundary the financial boundary draws for the books.

Prime cost — cost of goods sold plus gross labor, per restaurant per period: the restaurant's vital sign, and the number the labor domain exists to produce.

Direct labor — work with a countable path to specific output, e.g. a production day spent making prep items: these hours, this batch. Absorbed into the value of what was produced.

Indirect labor — work with no traceable path to any particular plate (cleaning, service, management, à-la-minute cooking during service). Stays a period-level restaurant cost; never spread onto products, because every spreading rule gives a different answer — the tell that none is true.

Labor absorption — the single seam where labor enters stock value: a production run carrying labor lines adds those wages to the produced item's value (recorded as its own explicit artifact, subtracted from the wages expense so nothing counts twice). From there the ordinary pool price and recipe explosion deliver it to every made item that uses the prep item.

Plate cost — one build's food and packaging cost at real pool prices, including direct labor embedded through stocked prep and deliberately excluding any share of indirect labor: every euro is traceable to something that went into the plate. Cost of goods sold is the period aggregate of items actually sold; a matrix may have a different plate cost for each build. "Self-price" is a calque, not model vocabulary.

Taught in: Labor & payroll.

Food attributes and food safety¶

Food attribute — a fact about what the food is — its nutrition, allergens, and shelf-life — as opposed to how much you have or what it cost. Food attributes roll up the recipe tree. Shelf-life informs receiving and the recognition of expired food as waste (expiry, below).

Shared rollup spine — the shared recipe-version, traversal, yield, and refresh rules behind cost, nutrition, allergens, and the shelf-life cap. A matrix's canonical food attributes use its base build, while cost may price a concrete build. Why one spine: giving any result its own composition graph is how a made item ends up showing stale calories after an ingredient swap.

Nutrition profile — the full nutrient set — calories, protein, carbohydrate, fat, sodium, fiber, sugars, saturated fat and cholesterol — which any item may carry. A positive recipe portion count makes a derived statement per serving; otherwise it is per 100 grams of weighed output. When a per-serving statement enters another recipe, a derived statement follows its exact recipe version while a manual one follows the recipe active on the calculation date; an impossible conversion withholds the whole computed statement, while imported label and public-reference profiles remain per-100-gram source facts.

Two-axis nutrition yield — the two independent reasons nutrition concentration shifts, both distinct from cost yield: output weight (whole-batch moisture change — 100 g of dry pasta becoming 250 g cooked dilutes the per-100-gram figures by 2.5), and consumed grams (the per-ingredient mass that actually enters the food — absorbed frying oil counts up, drained brine counts as zero). Why separate: they answer different questions and collapsing them mis-states nutrition.

Declared output weight — the weighed mass of a finished batch, the denominator every per-100-gram nutrition figure divides by. A batch counted in pieces or by the milliliter needs this weight declared before its nutrition means anything; without it the batch is one of the gaps that block a computed profile (see all-or-nothing computed nutrition). The weight is optional everywhere — a kitchen that doesn't publish nutrition never declares it, and nothing else (cost, production, stock) depends on it.

All-or-nothing computed nutrition — a made item states computed figures only when every ingredient it draws is fully profiled and the denominator required by its declared basis is known: portion count for a per-serving result, output weight for a per-100-gram result. Any gap withholds the whole computed statement and names what is missing; a hand-entered complete statement may remain authoritative. Why blank, not partial: a confident-looking incomplete label is worse than an honest absence.

Allergen — a declared allergen, set-unioned up the recipe tree to every made item that contains it; present (declared in) and may-contain (cross-contact) are distinct states that roll up distinctly. A restaurant is screened against its jurisdiction's allergen standard (below) — and EU law makes allergen information mandatory at the point of sale even for non-prepacked food. Why computed, never guessed: mislabeling is a legal and safety failure.

Allergen standard — the fixed list a jurisdiction regulates, the EU-14 or the US Big-9; a restaurant is screened against the list its country uses. The standard a statement was checked against is recorded on the statement, not re-chosen on each read, so an attestation stays legible as it was made even if the business later changes country — the stored allergen facts remain the single canonical set, and the standard is only the lens they are read through.

Shelf-life — how long a product stays safe and usable. Recorded as a use-by (a hard safety date) at the item's default storage condition, with an adjustment for once a pack is opened. For a made item it is recipe-derived — capped at its shortest-lived component's remaining life — and recalculated when the recipe changes.

Default storage condition — the condition (frozen, chilled, or ambient) an item is normally kept under; it selects the applicable shelf-life.

Two-stage shelf-life advisory — the way a shelf-life is recalculated: first a classifier reads the recipe's evidence into a fixed set of risk flags and is forbidden from naming a day count; then a cited, deterministic policy table maps those flags to a recommended and maximum number of days. Why two stages: it keeps the judgment that needs a food-safety source out of a free-form guess.

Risk flag / mitigation flag — a risk flag is one entry in the fixed vocabulary the classifier emits (an ingredient risk, a preparation, a process); a mitigation flag (such as "rapidly chilled, extends 2 days to 4") is surfaced only when ticking it would actually change the recommendation.

Food-safety policy table — the cited, data-driven, per-jurisdiction rule set that maps risk flags to shelf-life days (US food code versus EU rules). It is versioned data, so tuning a day-cap is an edit, not a rebuild. Two jurisdiction sets ship: a US set that is live, and an EU/Portugal set that is review-gated — every EU/Portugal rule is held for review, so the advisor only ever suggests review on those until a person signs the citations and day-caps off. The set a kitchen sees follows its country (Portugal gets the EU/Portugal set; everywhere else, including other EU countries until their own set lands, gets the US set). The advisor answers for any storage condition — frozen and ambient have a single conservative review-gated fallback rather than a full rulebook yet — and it only ever suggests; a person still sets the day count.

Min-of-children cap — the rule that a made item's shelf-life is no longer than its shortest-lived component's remaining life (the most-restrictive-component principle), computed on the shared rollup. Example: a bowl built from a 3-day chicken prep item and a 7-day dressing caps at 3 days.

Use-by date — the date stated for received food, or derived from its receipt date and shelf-life when no date is stated.

Expiry write-off — recording the quantity of expired stock actually discarded through an ordinary waste movement, valued at the warehouse's weighted-average price.

Taught in: Food attributes (expiry and waste).

Catalog and preparation¶

Dish — the familiar restaurant word for a sellable phantom item: it owns a recipe, is never tracked, and wears a product card. It is not a second catalog identity or a category membership; the seeded Dishes category merely gives new items those usual defaults, and Services gives the same ones under a heading that fits a booking.

Product card — the customer-facing face of one item: its authored name and description, ordered gallery and supporting documents. It is presentation over the item, not another identity; station, recipe output and food facts stay with the item and recipe where their operational meaning lives.

Packaging variant — how a recipe is packed for one fulfillment, identified to people by its contents: localized description, packaging materials, steps and media. A recipe keeps at most one variant for dine-in, one for delivery, and one general variant naming no fulfillment; a sale takes the variant for its channel's fulfillment, otherwise the general one, otherwise packs nothing. It needs no authored name because the materials, instructions and finished view are what distinguish one packing from another. Example: a bowl whose general variant is a kraft box and whose delivery variant is the box plus a sealed bag leaves the hall in the box and Glovo in box and bag.

Photo enhancement — a selected presentation of a real catalog photograph that may clean its surroundings, framing, lighting, or perspective while preserving the source as evidence. It must keep the meaning-bearing identity and physical facts the photograph proves, including real scale context, food composition, or preparation state where those are visible.

Recipe version — one edition of a recipe. Descriptive text, steps, media, and notes stay editable on any version, and so are composition and output facts wherever the books are open: changing them re-explodes, in the same stroke, every open-period consumption that posted through the version, so the books and the standard never drift apart. A version's composition stays fixed while a close still in force has priced consumption through it — the correction is a new version, scheduled in the open. Version two and later must carry a short change note explaining what changed.

Effective date — the one scheduling fact a recipe version carries: the business date from which it is the truth for its owner. A version with a date is on the schedule; one without is off it and has no effect on the books. The recipe in force for an item on a day is the scheduled version with the latest date at or before that day. One version per owner per date; the date may lie in the past, and it may be moved or cleared wherever the books are still open — and the open-period consumption the move affects re-explodes with it, so the books always answer to the schedule as it stands. Sealed dates cannot move, and sealed consumption never changes.

Schedule position — where a recipe version stands on its owner's timeline against a given day, read from its effective date: unscheduled (no date), upcoming (dated ahead), current (the latest date at or before the day — exactly one per owner), or superseded (its date arrived, and a later version's has too). A reading, never a stored state: the same version passes through upcoming, current and superseded as days go by. Why not "active": several versions of one owner are scheduled at once — past, present and future — and only one is current.

Unschedule — take a scheduled recipe version off its owner's timeline by hand. Its date clears and frees up for another version; open-period consumption that posted through it re-explodes against whatever the schedule still answers for those dates, or waits unresolved when nothing does. Scheduling it again, on any open date, brings it back. A version off the schedule that no closed period has priced is a draft in every respect — editable, re-ownable, deletable; one sealed facts quote is history — kept readable forever.

Completeness score — an advisory 0–100 readiness score for a recipe, built from weighted checks (ingredients, steps, header facts, media). It guides the operator and never blocks scheduling. It scores the authored production document only — never how many languages a translation covers, since translations are a reading-side convenience the author never has to think about.

Recipe line — one component in a recipe, pointing at either an item or a pinned nested recipe version (a bill-of-materials line). An ordinary line also states whether it is fixed, removable, or addable; a candidate line belongs to a slot. The two references propagate different ways: an item reference resolves that item's own recipe by date at every explosion, so child edits flow to every parent item automatically; a pinned nested version is frozen until the parent is re-versioned. An ingredient line may point only at an item whose recipe role is ingredient or producible; packaging items ride separate packaging rows (see Recipe role).

Tag — a per-company, keyed taxonomy label for items, with an authored name the operator types in their own language; its category states the tag's role and the seeded standard catalog gives every new company a baseline vocabulary, while visual styling is presentation rather than taxonomy.

Authored text — the only text anyone writes: a plain value (a description, a step, a tag name) typed in whatever language the writer happens to speak, carrying no language label. The system never needs to know which language it is. Authored text is the single source of truth; editing it is the only way to change what a recipe, product card, item, or tag says.

Derived translation — a machine-made rendition of a piece of authored text into one of the company's chosen reading languages. Translations are a disposable cache: regenerated whenever the authored text changes, never hand-edited, always safe to discard. Each carries the content version of the authored text it was made from, so a reader can tell at a glance whether a rendition is up to date or waiting to catch up. Regeneration runs in the background after a save, not in the moment, so a just-edited text reads as up to date in the language it was typed in and catches up in the others shortly after; a reader can also ask for a refresh on demand. The translator stays faithful — it carries the words across, never restyling, summarizing, or inventing, and it keeps numbers, times, temperatures, and brand and equipment names exactly as written.

Content version — a single counter on a recipe, product card, or tag that ticks up each time any of its authored text actually changes. A derived translation is current when it was made from the same version, and stale when it lags behind — the one fact that tells a reader a rendition is out of date.

Auto-translation languages — the set of reading languages a company turns on. Empty by default: with no languages chosen the system translates nothing and costs nothing. Adding a language asks the system to keep a rendition of every authored text in that language; removing one simply stops using the renditions it already made, never deleting any authored text.

Copy proposal — a tidy-up the system offers for a recipe's prose. On request it reads the authored description, notes, and step text and proposes a cleaner version of each in the company's kitchen voice — tighter, more concrete, on style — while holding every number, time, temperature, and brand, dish, or equipment name exactly as written and inventing nothing. It is purely a suggestion: each field is shown side by side, original against proposed, and nothing changes until the writer accepts it (and they can edit it first). Accepting is an ordinary edit of the authored text, so it is the same act as typing — which is why it, too, refreshes the translations. The proposal is a one-shot aid, never stored and never applied on its own; tags get no such tidy-up. (Distinct from a derived translation, which carries the same words into another language; a copy proposal stays in the language it was written in and changes the wording.)

Taught in: Catalog, Recipes & production.

Tenancy¶

Company — the tenant and the top isolation boundary: it owns all of one business's data (catalog, inventory, recipes, files, and the people who operate it). Every company-scoped record is filtered to the resolved company on read and stamped with it on write.

Company scoping (fail-closed) — the rule that, with no resolved company, a company-scoped read and a company-scoped write both refuse rather than returning or defaulting another tenant's data. The resolved company comes from the authenticated session, never from a value the client supplies.

Currency — the single currency a company keeps its money in (one per company; multi-currency receipts are out of scope). It is fixed at registration and never changes, since changing it would re-interpret every number already stored.

Tax regime — the per-company setting (US or EU at first) that says whether a purchase tax is recoverable when the supplier's document does not (see recoverable input VAT).

Restaurant — a company-scoped site that is the profit center (see profit center): the grain that food cost and margin are attributed to, linked selecting a consumption warehouse, stamped onto each consumption, and never the owner of a stock pool. It carries its own optional timezone, which is what stamps a sale with the right business date. It is a data dimension, not an authorization boundary — that boundary is the company.

Taught in: Scope & locations, Catalog.

Agent-surfaced findings¶

Dough finding — the operator-facing name for an issue the agent surfaces: a held unmapped sale, a close-blocker diagnosis, an order-line discrepancy. Why a dedicated name: findings are spoken about to the operator in agent terms, not in the internal vocabulary of how they were computed. (Distinct from a stock count's overage or shortage adjustments, which are ledger facts, not agent-surfaced issues.)