A provider quotes you something with five acronyms in it. You nod, because asking what MDR stands for in the middle of a pitch feels like admitting something. You go away, you compare two quotes that use different words for the same thing, and you make a decision on the parts you understood.
That happens constantly, and it is not a failure of intelligence. Nobody opened a store to learn what a payment gateway is. The vocabulary belongs to the people selling you things, which is precisely the problem.
The cost is not confusion. It is that you cannot negotiate a contract whose terms you cannot compare, and you cannot spot the difference between two quotes when one buries the important number behind a word you did not want to ask about. Every term below is one you will meet in a sales conversation, a statement or a contract.
Here they are, grouped by where you actually run into them rather than alphabetically, in plain language, with no attempt to make any of it sound more complicated than it is.
Jargon Is Not a Language Problem. It Is a Negotiating Problem.
Every industry builds a vocabulary, and most of it exists for good reasons. Precision matters when money moves. But the effect on a merchant is one-sided, because the person using the words has spent years with them and you have spent four minutes.
So the practical value of a glossary is not that you sound informed. It is that you can ask the second question. When a provider says settlement is fast, knowing what settlement actually means lets you ask when the money lands, whether that changes on a weekend, and who is holding it in between. That second question is where the real answer lives, and it is only available to someone who knows what the first word meant.
Where These Terms Show Up in One Transaction
A customer buys two coffees at nine in the morning. On the POS, each coffee is an SKU, and one has a modifier for oat milk. The staff member serving is on her own login, so the sale carries her name.
The sale completes and stock deducts against both SKUs. Your average transaction value for the day moves slightly, and the receipt prints with a QR code on it. She scans it and signs up for Qashier Treats with her mobile number, so the visit is now attached to a customer record rather than being anonymous.
At close, your end-of-day report is finished. Because your sales, your stock and your customer records sit on one platform, there is nothing to reconcile between systems and no separate list to update.
By tomorrow your stock position is current, your customer database has grown by one, and your reporting can already tell you which of those two coffees is the one people come back for. None of that required a single manual action from you.
Money and Payments
Settlement
Settlement is the transfer of money from a payment processor into your bank account after a customer has paid. It is not the same moment as the sale, which is why your daily sales and your bank balance rarely match on the same day. Always ask a provider when settlement happens rather than whether it is fast.
Merchant discount rate
The merchant discount rate, usually shortened to MDR, is the total percentage a provider deducts from each card transaction. It bundles several underlying costs into one number, which makes quotes easy to compare and harder to interrogate. Ask what it includes and whether it differs by card type, because a single blended figure can hide meaningful variation.
Chargeback
A chargeback is a forced reversal of a card payment, initiated by the customer through their bank rather than by you. It differs from a refund because you do not control it and it usually carries a fee. It is worth understanding a provider's dispute process before you ever need it.
Payment gateway
A payment gateway is the software layer that carries payment details securely between the point of payment and the parties who authorize it. In a store it usually sits invisibly inside a terminal. It becomes a term you notice when your POS and your payment provider are different companies, because the gateway is where the two are joined.
QR payment
A QR payment is one where the customer scans a code to authorize money moving from their bank or wallet to yours. QR Ph is the national standard that allows different banks and wallets to work with the same code. QR payments typically settle differently from card payments, so ask about timing separately.
E-wallet
An e-wallet is an app holding stored value or a linked funding source that a customer pays from directly. Each one is a separate arrangement behind the scenes, which is why some providers support a longer list than others. From your side the practical question is whether they all work through one setup or several.
Reconciliation
Reconciliation is the process of checking that your sales records and your money records describe the same amount. It exists because most businesses record sales in one place and money in another, and the two count differently. When everything runs on one platform, reconciliation stops being a task rather than becoming a faster one.
Cash float
A cash float is the money you start a shift with so you can give change. Counting it in and out is what makes a cash variance meaningful, since without a known starting figure you cannot tell a shortfall from a bad count.
Official receipt
An official receipt is the document a business is required to issue for a sale under local tax rules. What your system must produce, and how, depends on your registration and the nature of your business. Confirm the requirements with your provider and your accountant before choosing a system rather than after.
At the Counter
Point of sale
Point of sale, shortened to POS, is the system where a transaction is completed. Historically that meant a register. Today it usually means software that also records what was sold, to whom, by whom and at what time, which is the difference between recording money and recording your business.
Cloud POS
A cloud POS stores your data on remote servers rather than in the device on your counter. The practical consequences are that you can see your business from anywhere, your history survives a broken terminal, and multiple branches can share one set of records.
Offline mode
Offline mode is a cloud POS continuing to take sales when the internet connection drops, then syncing them once the connection returns. It is the single most important question to ask any cloud provider, because behavior varies enormously. QashierPOS keeps selling through an outage and syncs everything afterward, so nothing is lost.
Terminal
A terminal is the physical device used to complete a transaction. It may be part of your POS or a separate machine from another provider. When it is separate, information has to move between two systems for every sale, which is where line delays and reconciliation work come from.
Modifier
A modifier is a variation applied to an item at the point of sale, such as a milk choice, a size or an extra shot. Good modifier handling matters because a system that treats every variation as a separate product makes your reporting unreadable.
Void and refund
A void cancels a transaction before it has been completed, so no money moves. A refund returns money after a transaction has gone through. They look similar at the counter and are very different in your records, which is why a system worth using distinguishes them and records who performed each one.
End-of-day report
An end-of-day report, sometimes called a Z-report, summarizes a selling day and closes it off. On a basic register it is a total. On a POS it can break down by product, hour and staff member, which is what turns a closing ritual into information you can act on.
Staff permissions
Staff permissions define what each person can do on the system, such as applying discounts, processing returns or viewing reports. They exist to protect your staff as much as your sales, because when every action carries a name, nobody has to be asked to remember a busy Thursday.
Stock and Products
SKU
An SKU, or stock keeping unit, is the unique code for one specific sellable item, including its size or variant. Consistent SKUs across every branch and channel are what make your sales history readable, because the same product recorded three ways appears as three products.
Stock count
A stock count is a physical count of what you actually have, compared against what your system says you should have. Its purpose is not the count itself but the gap it reveals, which is where waste, theft and recording errors show up.
Stock transfer
A stock transfer is moving inventory between your own locations with the movement recorded on both sides. Done properly it lets one branch supply another instead of both reordering, which usually reduces the total stock a business holds.
Par level
A par level is the minimum quantity you want to keep of an item before reordering. Setting them turns ordering from a memory exercise into a rule, and they only work if your stock count updates automatically rather than periodically.
Shrinkage
Shrinkage is stock you paid for that never became a sale, through waste, breakage, theft or miscounting. You cannot manage it without an accurate expected figure to compare against, which is why businesses with manual counts usually have no idea what theirs is.
Cost price and cost of goods sold
Cost price is what you paid for an item. Cost of goods sold, shortened to COGS, is the total cost of everything you sold in a period. Recording cost price against each product is what allows your reports to be read by profit rather than by units moved.
Gross margin
Gross margin is what you keep from a sale after the cost of the goods, expressed as a percentage. It is the number that decides whether a busy business is a profitable one, and it cannot be calculated at product level unless cost prices are recorded.
Customers and Loyalty
CRM
CRM, or customer relationship management, refers to a system holding your customer records. The important question is not whether you have one but whether it knows what people bought, because a list of names without purchase history cannot tell you who is worth reaching.
Repeat customer rate
Repeat customer rate is the share of customers in a period who had bought from you before. It is arguably the most useful single number in a retail or food business, and most merchants cannot produce it because their transactions carry no customer identity.
Customer lifetime value
Customer lifetime value is the total profit you expect from one customer across the whole relationship rather than from a single visit. It reframes how much a new customer is worth acquiring, because someone who returns eight times a year is worth a very different amount from someone who came once.
Lapsed customer
A lapsed customer is one who used to visit regularly and has not returned within a window you define. They are the highest-value marketing audience a business has and the hardest to identify, because their absence generates no record unless something is tracking last visit dates.
Average transaction value
Average transaction value, sometimes called average basket, is your total sales divided by the number of transactions. Watching it alongside customer counts tells you whether growth came from more people or from the same people spending more, which call for different responses.
Attach rate
Attach rate is how often an additional item is sold alongside a main one, such as retail products in a salon or a pastry with a coffee. It is one of the cheapest sources of revenue in most businesses because it consumes no extra capacity, and it becomes coachable once you can see it by staff member.
Single source of truth
A single source of truth is one system holding the authoritative version of your data, so there is nothing to sync and nothing to reconcile. It is the difference between several tools that exchange information on a delay and one platform where the sale and the customer were always the same record.
Everything Connects, Which Is the Whole Point
Read back through those and notice how many describe a problem created by separation rather than a thing that exists naturally. Reconciliation exists because two systems count the same money. Gateway complexity exists because a POS and a terminal are different products. Inconsistent SKUs exist because catalogs are maintained in several places.
On one platform a good number of these terms simply stop being your problem. The sale creates the customer record, so repeat customer rate is available. The sale deducts the stock, so shrinkage becomes measurable. The reporting draws on all of it, so nothing has to be assembled by hand. You still benefit from knowing the vocabulary, because you will meet it in every contract and every sales conversation. You just meet less of it in your own evenings.
One login. One view. One platform.
Getting Started
QashierPOS, QashierHQ, Qashier Treats, Automated Marketing, Customer Reviews and Spotlight are available to businesses across the Philippines now, on one login. Bring this list to any provider conversation, including ours, and ask the second question each time.
Book a free demo and get plain answers to every term on this page.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does settlement mean for a merchant?
Settlement is when money from a transaction actually reaches your bank account, which is a different moment from the sale itself. That gap is why your daily sales and your bank balance rarely match on the same day. Ask any provider when settlement happens and whether the timing changes over weekends and holidays.
What is MDR in payments?
MDR stands for merchant discount rate, the total percentage deducted from each card transaction by a payment provider. It bundles several underlying costs into a single figure. Ask what it includes and whether it varies by card type, since a blended rate can hide meaningful differences.
What is the difference between a void and a refund?
A void cancels a transaction before it completes, so no money moves at all. A refund returns money after the transaction has already gone through. They look similar at the counter but appear differently in your records, and a system worth using distinguishes them and records who performed each.
What is offline mode on a POS system?
Offline mode is a cloud POS continuing to take sales when the internet drops, then syncing them once the connection returns. Behavior varies enormously between providers, so ask before you commit. QashierPOS keeps selling through an outage and syncs everything afterward.
What is an SKU and why does it matter?
An SKU is the unique code for one specific sellable item, including its size or variant. It matters because the same product recorded under three different names appears as three products in your reporting, which splits a genuine sales trend into pieces too small to notice.
What is a single source of truth in a business system?
It means one system holds the authoritative version of your data, so nothing has to be synced or reconciled between tools. In practice it is what removes end-of-day reconciliation, makes stock counts trustworthy and allows questions that cross sales, stock and customers to be answered at all.
How does Qashier Treats sign customers up?
Customers scan a QR code printed on their receipt and register with their mobile number, which takes under a minute and happens away from your counter. There is no app to download and no card to carry, and every visit after that is tracked automatically through QashierPOS.
Do I or my customers need to download an app?
No. Qashier runs in a web browser, so there is nothing to install and nothing tied to a particular device. Your customers do not need an app to join Qashier Treats either, because they sign up through the QR code on their receipt.