Glossary

A plain-language reference for the words used across these docs and inside BuddyStall. Terms are grouped by area; the paired terms in The Master–Store model and the Staff vs. Employee distinction trip people up most often, so start there if a screen ever uses a word in a way you didn't expect.

Roles & accounts

• Owner — the top-level account that owns the business and every store in it. Sees and controls everything.
• Manager — an admin account scoped to the stores it's assigned to. Feature access is set per manager. See Users & permissions.
• Admin — collective name for Owner and Manager accounts, the two roles that sign in to the Management Console.
• Staff — the shared account for a store's POS device, one per store. It is not a person — it's the login the counter device uses to reach the Staff Portal.
• Employee — a person who actually works a shift. Employees are recorded by attendance and register open/close, and are independent of the Staff account that happens to be logged in. "Who is logged in" and "who is working" are separate things. See Stores & employees.
• Management Console — the admin dashboard (sales, inventory, payroll, reports) that Owners and Managers sign in to.
• Staff Portal — the phone/tablet app staff use at the counter for POS, attendance, and inventory. You install it to the device's home screen, and it keeps working offline.

The Master–Store model

• Catalog — the set of definitions you build once and every store works from. Run one store and it still helps; run several and each new one starts from the shared catalog instead of from scratch.
• Master tier — the business-wide definition of an item, owned by the Owner: the master menu, inventory, and expenses.
• Store tier — a store's working copy of a master item, where you enable it, set its local price or stock, and adjust availability.
• Master menu / Store menu — the shared product catalog (Master menu) versus each store's priced, available copy of it (Store menu).
• Inventory master / Store inventory — the shared list of stock items (Inventory master) versus the per-store stock levels counted against it (Store inventory).
• Master expenses / Store expenses — the shared expense definitions (Master expenses) versus each store's recorded costs (Store expenses).

Menu

• Menu item (sales item) — a single thing a customer can buy.
• Size — a variant of a menu item (e.g. Small / Large), each able to carry its own price and recipe.
• Category — the grouping a menu item is filed under, used to organise the menu and the POS screen.
• Recipe — the link from a menu item (and size) to the inventory it consumes, so a sale automatically deducts the right stock. See Set up recipes.
• Combo — a menu item that bundles several products under one price. The combo's price already includes its components' adjustments, and it is always sold or refunded as a whole.

Inventory

• Stock level — the quantity of an inventory item a store currently holds.
• Unit — the unit an inventory item is counted in (pcs, kg, L, …).
• Opening stock — the starting quantity you set when an item first begins being tracked. See Set up your inventory.
• Stocktake — a physical count that reconciles the recorded stock level against what's actually on the shelf. See How to stocktake.
• Restock — recording stock coming in from a purchase, which raises the level.
• Waste — recording stock thrown away (spoilage, breakage). Logging waste also creates a matching expense. See Logging waste.
• Transfer — moving stock from one store to another. See Transferring stock.
• Inventory alert (low stock) — a flag raised when an item falls to or below its threshold. See Inventory alerts.
• Negative inventory — a level that has gone below zero. It signals stock that came in without a restock being recorded (an off-book purchase) — not unrecorded sales or waste. Fix it by recording the missing restock.

Expenses

• Expense item — a defined category of cost (rent, utilities, supplies) you record spending against. See Set up expense items.
• Cost entry — one recorded instance of an expense — an amount on a date against an expense item.
• Initial investment — the up-front money put into opening or equipping a store, recorded as its own kind of expense.
• Salary expense — staff pay recorded as an expense.
• Special item — an expense created automatically by another part of the app rather than entered by hand, such as the cost behind a waste log or a payroll run. See Recording expenses.

Orders & purchasing

• Supplier — a vendor you buy stock from. See Managing suppliers.
• Purchase order — a record of stock ordered from a supplier, tracked from placed through received.
• Receive — marking an order's goods as arrived, which adds them to stock. See Place & receive orders.

POS & register

• POS — the point-of-sale screen where staff ring up orders. See Take orders.
• Register session — one open-to-close cycle of the till at a store. Sales, refunds, and the cash count all belong to the session that was open when they happened.
• Open / close register — starting a session with a cash float and ending it with a counted drawer. See Open & close register.
• Sale (transaction) — one completed order: its items, payment, and receipt.
• Refund — reversing a sale, returning the money and restoring the stock it consumed. See How to refund.
• Receipt number — the sequential number identifying each sale on its receipt.

Working offline

• Offline-first — built to keep working without a connection. The Staff Portal records sales and clock-ins on the device and uploads them later.
• Queue — the on-device list of actions taken offline that are waiting to upload. The offline badge shows the count (Offline — N pending), and each unsynced row carries its own Pending tag until its upload confirms.
• Pending / Failed — a Pending item is queued and uploads (or retries) on its own; a Failed item hit an error and stays in the queue until someone reviews it from the Failed dialog.
• Sync — the upload pass that drains the queue to the server once the connection returns. See Working offline.

Attendance, shifts & payroll

• Attendance — the record of who worked and when, built from clock-ins and clock-outs. See How time and pay work.
• Clock in / out — an employee marking the start and end of their work, on the Staff Portal. See Clock in & out.
• Shift — a planned block of work assigned to an employee. See Shift management.
• Payroll — turning recorded hours into pay for a period. See Payroll.
• Pay formula — how an employee's pay is calculated (e.g. an hourly rate), applied to their recorded time.

Dashboard

• Dashboard — the performance summary for a store or the whole business — sales, expenses, and trends at a glance. See Reading the dashboard.
• Store comparison — viewing several stores side by side to see how each performs against the others. See Store comparison.

Read next

Franchise terms

• Franchise — a business arrangement in which a Franchisor licenses its brand and operating setup to independent stores (Franchisees) that run under it. See Joining a franchise.
• Franchisor — the head office of a franchise: it publishes the shared catalog and supplies its connected stores.
• Franchisee — a store that has connected to a franchise and works from the Franchisor's catalog. See Connect & sync.
• Franchise ordering — buying stock from the Franchisor instead of an outside supplier. See Purchase from Franchisor.