Glossary
Restaurant technology & POS glossary
The terms that come up when you run a food or drink venue in India — from the till and the kitchen pass to the books. Plain-language definitions, and where each one lives in DineOps.
Point of sale & ordering
- EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale)
- The software-driven till that records each order, applies charges and taxes, takes payment and pushes the sale into reporting. In India it's used interchangeably with “POS billing software”. A modern EPOS is touch-first and cloud-based, so one screen runs dine-in, takeaway and delivery.
- POS & Billing
- KOT (Kitchen Order Ticket)
- The instruction that tells the kitchen what to make the moment an order is confirmed — printed at a station or shown on a screen. Splitting a bill into station-wise KOTs keeps the hot kitchen, cold section and bar working from only their own items.
- Kitchen Display & Inventory
- QR ordering
- Guests scan a per-table QR code, open the menu in their phone's browser and order without an app or a queue, while a staff-approve step keeps control of the kitchen. Widely used across Indian cafés and QSRs to ease the counter rush.
- QR Menu & Ordering
Kitchen & inventory
- KDS (Kitchen Display System)
- A screen that replaces printed tickets, showing live orders routed to the right station with prep timers and status. It keeps the pass calm at peak, cuts paper, and tells the floor the moment a dish is ready.
- Kitchen Display & Inventory
- Auto-86 (86ing an item)
- “86” is kitchen shorthand for an item that's run out. Auto-86 pulls a dish from every channel — dine-in, QR, WhatsApp and aggregators — the instant its recipe-linked stock hits zero, so staff can't sell what the line can no longer make.
- Kitchen Display & Inventory
- GRN (Goods Receipt Note)
- The record raised when a supplier delivery is checked in against its purchase order. It logs what actually arrived — quantity, price, batch — so stock and payables stay accurate and a short or wrong delivery is caught at the door, not at month-end.
- Kitchen Display & Inventory
- FEFO (First-Expiry-First-Out)
- Issue the stock that expires soonest first, rather than simply the oldest. For perishable F&B ingredients, FEFO cuts spoilage and supports food-safety compliance by tracking batches against their expiry date, not just their purchase date.
- Kitchen Display & Inventory
- Recipe costing / BOM (Bill of Materials)
- A Bill of Materials lists the exact ingredients and quantities in a dish; recipe costing prices that list to show what a plate costs to make. It powers accurate food-cost %, menu-engineering decisions and ingredient-level stock depletion as you sell.
- Kitchen Display & Inventory
- Food cost percentage
- The share of a dish's selling price taken up by its ingredients — ingredient cost ÷ selling price. A core profitability lever: many F&B operators target roughly 28–35%, though it varies by format. Tracking it per item flags dishes that quietly lose money.
- Kitchen Display & Inventory
Accounts & reconciliation
- Aggregator reconciliation
- Matching what Zomato and Swiggy owed you — the expected net after their commission, taxes and discounts — against what actually reached your bank. Payout cycles and deductions make manual matching painful; reconciliation surfaces every shortfall instead of absorbing it.
- Accounts & Reconciliation
- Day-close (EOD reconciliation)
- The end-of-day routine that totals sales, taxes, collections and channel payouts and squares them against cash and bank. Done well it's automatic and takes minutes; done on a spreadsheet it's the nightly chore that reconciliation exists to remove.
- Accounts & Reconciliation
Service & venue types
- Covers
- The number of guests served, counted per head rather than per table — two tables of four are eight covers. Covers drive prep planning, staffing and per-guest metrics like average spend, and read truer than table counts.
- AI Insights & Floor Plan
- Table turnover
- How many times a table is seated with new guests across a service. Higher turnover lifts revenue from the same floor; a table-aware POS and a live floor plan shorten the gap between one bill closing and the next party being seated.
- Fine-dining venues
- Cloud / ghost / dark kitchen
- A delivery-only kitchen with no dine-in room, often running several brands from one line for the aggregators. It trades a storefront for lower rent and menu flexibility, and needs unified orders, shared inventory and per-brand reconciliation to stay profitable.
- Cloud & Ghost Kitchen Software
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