Seventy terms across six clusters, written by the people who build the system — not from a dictionary. Each entry says what a term actually means in a working business, what it costs you to get wrong, and which neighbouring term it gets confused with.
Most business software is sold on features, and features do not help when two people mean different things by the same word. This glossary is the vocabulary we use when we build: the operating record, the allocation model behind partial payments, the split between quoted, billed, and collected, the difference between a permission and an approval threshold. It is written to be read once and then referred back to.
Owners and operators of Indian small businesses who are competent but not accountants, engineers, or tax lawyers. Also for the person doing the work — the counter staff member, the delivery lead, the one who closes the day — because most of the confusion in a business is not ignorance, it is two people using the same word for different records.
Every term has a definition in plain language, a line on why it matters in practice rather than a restatement, and a line naming the specific term it gets confused with. That last line is the useful one: most costly mistakes in a small business are a confusion between two neighbouring words, not a gap in knowledge.
It is not tax or legal advice, and the GST cluster says so prominently. It is not a product feature list, and where the product deliberately stops — cost accounting, statutory accounting, filing — the definition says so. And it is not a substitute for the one authority that always outranks a glossary: your own contract, your own accountant, and the law in your state.
The records a business actually runs on: the relationship, the deal, the scope, the work, and the four money states that fall out of it.
The claim, the money event, and the link between them — plus the four different things people mean when they say a payment was reversed.
Margin, receivables, ageing, and the gap between work earned and money actually received — including where a margin figure stops being trustworthy.
Who may do what, at which value, in which scope — and how you find out afterwards what actually happened.
Stock and counter vocabulary: what a SKU is, why shrinkage is not the same as an adjustment, and which numbers are decisions you set rather than facts the system finds.
Indian GST terminology only. This cluster states no rate, no threshold, and no filing requirement — confirm your own position with your chartered accountant.
The delivery vocabulary: what a task is versus a project, why a hand-off is where delivery quietly fails, and why utilisation is not productivity.
The working vocabulary of a pipeline: sources, stages, ownership, next actions, and the forecasts that stop being trustworthy when stages are never closed out.
Ticketing and entry vocabulary, including the states a gate operator actually has to act on and what an offline scan defers rather than solves.
Triggers, actions, retries and idempotency — the machinery that runs the business when nobody is watching, and where it quietly causes harm instead.
Each entry links to its definition on the cluster page it belongs to.
For owners and operators of small businesses in India who are competent but not accountants, engineers, or tax lawyers — the person who has to decide whether the software, the number, or the workflow is actually right. It assumes you know your business well and want the vocabulary to be precise.
Mostly from the system we build: the operating record that runs from customer to opportunity to quote to project to work to invoice to payment, plus the inventory, roles, and reporting around it. Where a term has a legal or accounting meaning, it is defined by the law or the standard rather than by us — and we say which.
No, and it says so at the top of the page. It states no rate, no threshold, no filing rule, and no deadline. It defines the terms and points at the official sources; if you have filing obligations, confirm the specifics of your own position with your chartered accountant.
Because the confusion is where the cost is. A credit note confused with a refund, or a discount written as a margin instead of a markup, produces a wrong document or a wrong price that nobody notices until much later. Naming the neighbouring term is more useful than restating the definition.
Not all of them, and where it does not, the definition says so rather than implying otherwise. Cost accounting, statutory accounting, and tax filing stay with the tools built for them; project margin and client profitability are commercial views that are only as meaningful as the cost data you record against them.
Yes, and that is one of the reasons they exist. Definitions drift quietly inside a business, and two reports become incomparable when a definition changes mid-year. Adopting one written definition — and writing down any place your business deliberately means something different — is most of the value.
This glossary describes a vocabulary, not a product recommendation. Where the real meaning of a term depends on your contract, your accountant, or the law in your state, that is the authority — not this page, and not the software. Every cluster page carries the same note in full, and the GST cluster states plainly that it is a terminology reference rather than tax or legal advice.
Where a fact could not be verified, it is omitted rather than guessed, and where a requirement was out of scope to state confidently, the definition says so instead of implying a number. If you find a definition here that your own business means differently, write your version down — that is the correct outcome of adopting a glossary, not a reason to argue with it.
The chain this glossary describes.
The billing and collection vocabulary in product form.
Roles, permissions, approvals, and audit history.
Quoted, billed, collected, outstanding.
Work the margin, ageing, and reorder numbers yourself.
Plans, and what each one covers.
The partial-payment model in full.
How the access model is actually built.