Glossary

Definitions of every term used across Maska procurement — locations, people, documents, stock, costing, expiry and kitchen production.

A shared vocabulary for the procurement & inventory module. Terms are grouped by area; document lifecycles are shown as state tables.

Organisation & locations

Tenant — a single business (restaurant group) on Maska. All data — items, vendors, stock, documents — belongs to one tenant and is never visible across tenants.

Location — any physical place that holds stock. One of three types: warehouse, central kitchen, or outlet.

Outlet — a customer-facing branch (a restaurant or store). Outlets requisition stock, receive transfers and run stock takes. Staff are scoped to their outlet.

Warehouse — a central stock-holding location that receives purchase orders from vendors and supplies outlets via transfers.

Central kitchen (CK) — a prep location that produces stock and dispatches it to the warehouse. Outlets never receive directly from the kitchen — the warehouse receives the kitchen’s goods and forwards them to the requesting outlet via a transfer.

Department — a section within the business (e.g. Bar, Kitchen, Housekeeping) used to group which items and staff belong together. Enabling a department on an outlet seeds that department’s items there at zero stock so staff can count them.

Category — the item grouping you see on stock lists and filters (Dairy, Bakery, Produce and so on). Managed under Settings → Categories.

People — the four personas

Everyone signs in with the same login; what they see is decided by their role.

A user can hold more than one role; the highest one decides their persona. Kitchen users must be assigned to a central kitchen; outlet staff to an outlet.

Catalog

Item — a stock-keeping product. Each item has a type (raw material, consumable or finished good), a base unit, and an auto-minted SKU.

SKU — the item’s stock-keeping code, auto-minted like ITM-00001. Unique per tenant.

UOM (unit of measure) / base unit — the unit an item’s stock is stored, costed and ledgered in (kg, g, L, ml, pcs…). Every quantity in the system is a base-unit number; display units are presentation only.

Display unit (secondary unit) — an optional friendlier unit screens show on top of the base unit — e.g. counting bread in loaves while stock is held in slices. The conversion factor is the number of base units in one display unit (16 slices ÷ 8 = 2 loaves). When no display unit is set, screens show the base unit. See Units of measure.

Pack / purchase unit — items may be bought in packs (a BOX, TRAY or PACK of so many base units). Ordering happens in whole packs; stock is always stored in base units.

Par level / reorder point — the per-location threshold below which an item counts as low stock and should be reordered. Set per item per location.

Shelf life — how many days an item typically keeps. It drives the default expiry date when stock is received (received date + shelf life). Items with no shelf life are treated as non-perishable.

Vendor (supplier) — a business you buy from, with contact details and payment terms (net 7/15/30, advance, or cash on delivery).

Draft vendor — a vendor auto-created during an import because it appeared in your file with no contact details. You can price against a draft vendor, but a PO can’t be sent to one until you add a phone number or email.

Vendor catalog — a vendor’s price list: a unit price per item, an optional minimum order quantity, and a preferred vendor flag (one preferred vendor per item).

GST rate — the statutory Indian tax slab on an item: 0, 5, 12, 18 or 28 percent.

Procurement documents

Every document gets an auto-minted doc number and moves through a defined lifecycle.

Purchase Request (PR) / requisition — a request to procure items, typically raised by an outlet or department. An approved PR is converted into a purchase order.

Purchase Order (PO) — an order placed with a vendor for items at agreed prices. Receiving against a PO is done with a GRN.

PO approval threshold — the rupee value (set by the owner in Settings) at or above which a PO must be approved by the owner before it is sent. If no threshold is set, every PO waits for owner approval. Orders below the threshold go straight out.

PO comms — the delivery of a sent PO to the vendor by email and/or WhatsApp, chosen when you send it. A Resend action delivers it again if the vendor missed it. See Send a PO to a vendor.

Goods Received Note (GRN) — records the receipt of goods. Posting a GRN writes the stock ledger, updates balances (via WMA), captures expiry dates on perishable lines, and advances the source PO or transfer. A GRN’s source is a purchase order or a transfer; kitchen dispatches are received through their own dispatch-receive flow. States: Draft → Posted (or Cancelled).

Transfer — a stock movement between locations (e.g. warehouse → outlet). States: Draft → In Transit → Received (or Cancelled). The receiving side records it as a transfer-sourced GRN.

Short Supply Note (SSN) — raised when a transfer arrives short: it lists each line’s ordered, received and short quantity against the source transfer. The warehouse either sends the remainder (Resupplied) or closes it out with a reason (Short-closed). States: Open → Resupplied or Short-closed.

In-transit variance — the gap between what was dispatched and what actually arrived, recorded at the moment of receiving (on a transfer or a kitchen dispatch). It’s what creates a short supply note.

Adjustment — a manual change to stock outside the normal purchase/transfer flow: an opening balance or a variance. A write-off (wastage, spoilage, damage, expiry, count variance) posts as a variance adjustment carrying a reason. A manager correcting on-hand outside a stock take posts as a variance too — which is how it surfaces to the owner for review. States: Draft → Posted (or Cancelled).

Opening balance — the initial stock seeded at a location when it is first set up. Priced from the vendor catalog when available.

Stock & costing

Stock balance — the current on-hand quantity and average cost of one item at one location. The live “how much do we have, and what is it worth”.

Stock ledger — the append-only history of every stock movement (GRN, adjustment, transfer, wastage…), each row carrying the running quantity and running average cost. The ledger is the source of truth; the balance is its tip.

WMA (weighted moving average) — the costing method. On every receipt the existing on-hand value is blended with the incoming value to recompute a new average cost. Stock value is always quantity × average cost.

Low stock — an item whose on-hand quantity is at or below its par level (when a par is set).

Stock take — a physical count to reconcile recorded stock against reality. Differences surface as variances and post correcting adjustments. Each outlet runs takes on a cadence (weekly, fortnightly or monthly), and the next one carries a schedule status:

Variance — a difference between two quantities: counted vs recorded (stock take), or received vs ordered (GRN). Small differences within tolerance are treated as exact matches.

Wastage — stock written off as a loss, logged against an item, quantity and reason (wastage, spoilage, damage, expiry, count variance, other). It posts as a variance adjustment.

Expiry

Lot — one batch of an item received together, carrying its own expiry date. The expiry is defaulted from the item’s shelf life at goods-receive (received date + shelf-life days) and can be corrected with a tap — it never blocks receiving.

Expiry horizon — how far ahead the module looks for “expiring soon” stock. Two levels, set org-wide in Settings (with shipped defaults): critical — within 48 hours (shown red); warning — within 7 days (shown amber).

Use first — the cue on stock lists that floats the soonest-expiring items to the top, so staff cook and sell those before fresher stock.

Dispose queue — expired lots still sitting on the books. Each one can be written off in a tap: at an outlet or kitchen it goes through the wastage flow; at the warehouse, through adjustments.

Expiry attestation — the daily one-tap “No expired stock on hand” confirmation per location. A clean attest needs an empty dispose queue; attesting while expired lots remain open requires a note.

Vendor freshness — how much shelf life a supplier actually delivers, averaged over their last 90 days of receipts. 100% means delivered brand-new. A supplier scoring below the freshness floor (default 60%) gets flagged.

Reorder cover — the “don’t reorder yet” flag on ordering screens: if the stock you already hold is expiring within the warning horizon and already covers what you’re about to order, the line is flagged so you don’t buy stock you may bin. Advisory only — it never blocks the order.

Kitchen production

Production order (indent) — an outlet’s order to the central kitchen for kitchen-made goods. States: Submitted → Approved → Triaged → Partially fulfilled → Fulfilled → Closed (or Rejected). The kitchen accepts one and queues its batches in a tap (Accept & queue batches).

Batch — one run of a recipe on the kitchen’s plan for the day. States: Assigned → In progress → On hold → Completed (or Aborted).

Make list — the kitchen’s cooking view for the day: every batch to run, worked through as the day goes.

Dispatch — the note that moves finished goods from the kitchen to the warehouse. States: Draft → Sent → Received. When the warehouse receives it, an onward transfer to the requesting outlet is created automatically.

Kitchen requisition — the kitchen’s own purchase request for raw ingredients, raised from its Requisitions page (e.g. when kitchen stock drops below par).

Central kitchen assignment — every kitchen user is linked to one central kitchen (set in Settings → Users & Roles). Their whole console — orders, batches, stock — is scoped to it.

Petty cash

Petty cash — small expenses logged against a location (and optionally a department) — each entry carries the shop, category, amount, how it was paid (cash, UPI, card, personal), an optional photo of the receipt, and who paid. Entries move Logged → Reviewed when a manager signs them off.

Float — the cash allowance set for a location (or an org-level default). The petty-cash summary tracks the float, cash spent against it, and the remaining balance per location.

Recipes

Recipe tier — a recipe’s chef-facing classification — what it produces:

Notifications

Notification (bell inbox) — a persisted in-app message shown in the bell inbox, with its own read/unread state per person. The bell shows an unread count. Typical kinds: a stock take due, or a stock take started at your outlet.

System

Doc number — an auto-minted, per-tenant document identifier, e.g. PO-2026-000001, GRN-2026-000001, ADJ-2026-000001. Minted so numbers never collide or skip.

Audit log — a field-level change history (old value → new value, who, when) recorded for items and other records, surfaced as History / Change history in the UI. Visible to owners and managers.