The words a POS buyer meets
Short definitions of the terms behind a restaurant POS: what each one means, how it works and how Brindola does it. The first sentence of each is the definition; the rest is the mechanism.
- Offline-first POS · offline POS · local-first POS
- An offline-first POS is a point-of-sale system whose record of truth lives on a device in the venue, so that taking orders, sending them to the kitchen, taking payment and closing the day all keep working when the internet goes down, for as long as it is down.
- Kitchen display system · KDS · kitchen screen
- A kitchen display system, or KDS, is a screen in the kitchen that shows orders as tickets the moment they are entered at the terminal, replacing or supplementing the printed kitchen ticket, and lets a cook mark each item or course as done.
- Self-service kiosk · self-order kiosk · ordering kiosk · kiosk POS
- A self-service kiosk is a touch screen in a venue where guests browse what the venue sells, build their own order and confirm it without a cashier, and receive an order number to collect the food by.
- Business date · trading day · business day rollover
- The business date is the day a sale is booked to for reporting and the close, which is not always the calendar date: a restaurant that trades past midnight counts a bill closed at one in the morning as part of the evening it began.
- Multi-brand kitchen · virtual brand · dark kitchen · cloud kitchen · ghost kitchen
- A multi-brand kitchen is one kitchen that cooks and sells under several brand names at once from a shared line, shared stock and one team. Often these are virtual brands that exist only on delivery platforms.
- Merchant of record · MoR
- The merchant of record is the company that legally sells you a product, charges your card, collects and remits the sales tax or VAT of your country, and appears on your statement. For software it is often a payment company acting on the vendor's behalf rather than the vendor itself.
- Fiscal printer · fiscal device · fiscal module · certified receipt device
- A fiscal printer is a receipt printer, or a module attached to one, that a tax authority has certified to record every sale in tamper-proof memory and print a receipt carrying a fiscal number, so that the state can audit a venue's sales from the device itself.
- Event-sourced POS · event log · append-only ledger
- An event-sourced POS records every action as an event in an append-only log (item added, item voided, payment taken, order closed) and derives every screen and every report from that log, so that nothing is ever edited in place and the history of a sale is the sale.
- Master and replica · LAN POS · local server POS · paired devices
- In a master-and-replica POS, one device in the venue, the master, holds the data and serves every other terminal, kitchen screen and display over the venue's own local network, and each of those replicas keeps a copy it can read when the master is briefly unreachable.
- Aggregator order intake · delivery platform integration · order bridge · marketplace orders
- Aggregator order intake is the path by which orders placed on a delivery platform such as Wolt, Bolt Food or Glovo arrive inside the venue's POS as ordinary orders, instead of being read off a platform tablet and typed in again by hand.
See the product these words describe
Every term below is a part of Brindola. The product page walks through them in the order a service does.