Qvian Glossary — What the Terms Mean

Definitions of the vocabulary Qvian uses: business unit, trading partner, register session, folio, offering, conversion factor, part-costed, output tax, days of cover and more.

Qvian uses some words in specific ways, and a few of them carry real consequences — the difference between unavailable and disabled, between a count fix and a wastage entry, or between output tax existing and a day never being reconciled. This page defines the vocabulary used across the documentation.

Last updated 24 August 2026

The platform

The structural concepts everything else sits inside.

Organization: Your company. It holds the people, the roles, the subscription, and one or more business units beneath it. Read more.
Business unit — also called BU, outlet, location, branch: One trading operation with its own books — a restaurant, a shop, a hotel, a dive centre. Each has its own chart of accounts, stock, registers, customers and reports, and its own set of enabled modules. Most "why can I not see this?" questions resolve to being in a different business unit. Read more.
Module: A capability that can be enabled or disabled per business unit — Restaurant, KDS, Inventory, Hotel Operations, Dive Operations and so on. A screen appears only when the module is enabled AND the person holds the permission. Read more.
Permission: A named right, written as area:action — for example inventory:count or daily_reconciliation:create. Permissions are bundled into roles, and roles are assigned per business unit. Read more.
Role: A named bundle of permissions assigned to a person for one business unit. System roles cannot be edited; custom roles can. Read more.
Qvi: The assistant built into Qvian. It answers by querying your live data through a set of tools rather than from general knowledge, and can take a limited set of actions within your permissions. Read more.
Staff app: The separate mobile app for staff working away from a desk. Same data as the main system, but built for a phone, with a five-slot bottom bar of which three tabs each person pins for themselves. Read more.
Consumer app — also called consumer PWA, guest app: The guest-facing progressive web app where customers discover businesses, scan a table QR to order, shop, track orders, and hold loyalty points and credit. Read more.

Selling and cash

What happens at the till, and how a trading day is closed.

Register — also called till: A till. A register must have an open session before it can take a sale, because every sale belongs to a session and the session is what gets counted at close. Read more.
Register session — also called shift: One period of a register being open, from the opening float to the closing count. Both POS and hotel front desk registers use the same model. Read more.
Daily reconciliation — also called end of day, daily recon: The manager-level close of a trading day for one business unit. It aggregates every closed register session for that day and, on completion, posts the journal entry and creates the output tax records. A day never reconciled is missing from your tax return. Read more.
Variance: The difference between what a register was expected to hold and what was actually counted, recorded per payment method with a reason. A variance never posts to revenue — it goes to a designated variance account. Read more.
On account — also called credit sale: A credit sale. The goods leave and the sale is recorded, but no money reaches the register — the amount becomes a receivable against the customer. Requires a customer to be attached; it cannot be a walk-in. Read more.
Walk-in: A sale with no customer attached, or a guest with no prior booking. An anonymous sale earns no loyalty points and can never be sold on credit.
Quick sale: A one-off sale of something with no catalogue product behind it. It records revenue and tax but moves no stock and has no cost of sale. Read more.
Blind return: A return with no link to the original sale, used when the customer has no receipt. Nothing verifies what was paid or when, so most businesses restrict it to managers and refund to store credit. Read more.
Even exchange: An exchange where the value returned equals the value taken, so nothing is settled either way. Read more.
Credit note: The document raised by a return, reversing the original sale rather than recording a negative one. Returns and exchanges are excluded from reconciliation and tax aggregation for this reason. Read more.
Sub-bill: A named portion of a table's bill created when splitting by items. A sub-bill owns its items, settles separately, takes its own payment method and prints its own receipt. Read more.

Stock and purchasing

How inventory moves, what it costs, and how you decide what to buy.

Weighted average cost — also called WAC, average cost: How Qvian values stock. Each receipt at a new price blends into the existing average in proportion to quantity, so cost reflects what your current stock actually cost rather than only the latest price. Read more.
Cost of goods sold — also called COGS: The cost of stock at the moment it is sold or consumed, taken at the weighted average. It is what turns revenue into gross margin. Read more.
Days of cover — also called cover: How long current stock will last at your actual rate of use. It is the useful reorder signal — two hundred units of something sold twice a month is not urgent; twenty of something used daily is. Read more.
Count fix: A single-product correction on the Stock Day Book, used when the shelf disagrees with the system and the shelf is right. Use a reason code instead whenever you know what actually happened to the stock. Read more.
Recount — also called stocktake, physical count: A physical count of an area, reconciled against system quantities and reviewed before posting. It moves through In Progress, Awaiting Review, Approved and Posted — counting alone never changes stock. Read more.
In transit: Stock dispatched from one business unit but not yet received by another. It belongs to neither shelf, which is why a transfer left in transit shows as a shortage at one end and an unexplained gap at the other. Read more.
Goods receipt: Recording what physically arrived against a purchase order. This is what moves stock and books the cost — creating the order does neither. Read more.
Capitalise: To record a cost as an asset rather than an expense, so it reaches the profit and loss later — when stock is sold, or over an asset's life through depreciation. Read more.

The layer between what you buy and what you sell.

Kitchen stock — also called ingredient catalogue: The ingredient layer between recipes and purchased products. A recipe calls for 200g of butter; you buy 5kg blocks. Kitchen stock holds the ingredient, its link to the product, and the conversion between their units. Read more.
Conversion factor: How many recipe units are in one purchase unit — a 5kg block used in grams is 5000. The single most common source of wrong recipe costs, usually out by a factor of a thousand. Read more.
Sub-recipe: A recipe used inside other recipes — a sauce, a stock, a dough. It carries its own cost, which rolls up into every dish that uses it, so one ingredient price change re-costs them all. Read more.
Yield: How much one batch of a recipe produces. A recipe that makes four portions but is entered as one shows a cost per portion four times too high. Read more.
Part-costed: A menu item whose recipe has ingredients with no cost. It still shows a food cost percentage — a flatteringly low one, because part of the dish is missing from the calculation. Treat it as uncosted, not as good news. Read more.
Food cost percentage: Recipe cost divided by selling price, calculated net of tax. Using a tax-inclusive price would flatter every dish by the tax rate. Read more.
Unavailable — also called 86, 86'd, sold out: A menu item that is temporarily off — you have run out today. It stays on the menu. Distinct from disabled. Read more.
Disabled: A menu item taken off the menu for good, while keeping its sales history. Its row stays in the table, dimmed and sorted last. Distinct from unavailable. Read more.
Made, Wasted, Count fix: The three columns of the Stock Day Book — what you produced, what was lost, and where the shelf disagreed with the system — recorded on one sheet per business unit per day. Read more.

Money and tax

Terms that carry accounting or compliance consequences.

Output tax — also called GST collected: Tax you charged customers on sales — what you owe. Created at exactly four points: daily reconciliation, invoicing, recurring invoices and reservation billing. A sale never writes a tax record when it is rung up. Read more.
Input tax — also called GST claimable: Tax you paid suppliers on purchases and expenses — what you can reclaim. It comes from posted documents, not from documents still sitting in the intake queue. Read more.
Taxable customer — also called TIN: A customer with a registered tax identification number on their business profile at the time of sale. The TIN is captured onto the sale as it happens — adding it later does not reclassify earlier sales. Read more.
Zero-rated: A supply taxed at 0%. It produces no tax record at all — there is no tax to record — so it is reported through the Value @ 0% figure aggregated from line items. Read more.
Green Tax: The Maldives per-person, per-day environmental levy on tourist stays, collected from guests and remitted monthly to MIRA. Calculated at checkout, posted to Green Tax Payable, filed by the 28th of the following month. Read more.
Customer deposits: Money received for a service not yet delivered. It is a liability, not revenue — it becomes revenue when the service is delivered. A busy booking period showing large deposits and modest revenue is correct. Read more.
Folio: A billing container within a reservation. Charges are routed to a folio per guest, per corporate account or per room, then split, paid and settled there. Read more.
Inter-BU settlement: Clearing a balance that has built up between two of your own business units — from stock transfers, room charges or cross-unit packages. What one shows as payable, the other must show as receivable. Read more.
Opening balance: What a customer or supplier already owed at your cut-over date from a previous system. Set once, at cut-over — adding one to a partner with trading history in Qvian double-counts. Read more.
Credit limit: The maximum a customer may owe at any time before further credit sales are blocked. A customer with no limit set is effectively unlimited, so nothing will ever warn you. Read more.
Depreciation: Spreading a fixed asset's cost across its useful life, so the balance sheet reflects wear rather than the original invoice. A profit and loss with no depreciation line overstates profit. Read more.
Project — also called cost centre, programme: A tag on spend so you can report what a particular piece of work cost, separately from what the business spent. Also called a cost centre. Read more.

Hospitality and activities

Terms specific to hotels, dive centres and guest operations.

Departure: A physical fact: this boat leaves at this time. It exists whether or not anything is sold on it, and it belongs to the vessel rather than to a product. Read more.
Offering: A commercial fact: this dive product is sellable on that departure, at this price. One departure can carry several offerings, and they all draw seats from the same hull — there are no per-product caps. Read more.
Manifest: The diver list for a departure, showing certification, equipment notes and fulfilment status. It is what goes on the boat. Read more.
Dive boss: The staff member responsible for the day's diving. Only active dive staff can be assigned. Read more.
Inspected: A cleaned room that someone has checked and confirmed ready to sell. Distinct from completed, which means cleaned but unchecked — only inspected rooms should be assigned to arriving guests. Read more.
Table session: One period of a table being occupied. Everyone at the table shares the session, so orders from several phones arrive as one table's worth of food and the bill covers them all. Read more.
Handover: Recording the state of a rented vehicle as it leaves — odometer, fuel and existing condition. It is the baseline that makes damage on return chargeable. Read more.
Package: A bundle of services sold as one product, priced by one of three modes, and able to span business units with revenue allocated to whichever unit delivered each part. Read more.

Documents and work

How paperwork and staff tasks move through the system.

Document intake: Capturing a supplier invoice or receipt — usually photographed in the staff app — into a queue where someone with processing rights reviews the AI extraction and posts it. Read more.
Capture vs processing: Two deliberately separate rights. Anyone can capture a document; only privileged users can classify its lines and post it to the ledger. The person receiving a delivery is rarely the person who should decide which account it hits. Read more.
Prior balance: An unpaid amount carried forward on a supplier statement or utility bill. It is not a new expense — booking it as one double-counts the earlier bill. Read more.
Routine: Recurring work that materialises as tasks automatically on schedule, so a daily opening checklist does not depend on someone remembering to create it. Read more.
Active-work queue: A list of open work — incoming orders, payment approvals, awaiting handover — bounded by status rather than by date. Records legitimately sit for days, so a date filter would hide exactly the ones needing attention. Read more.

61 terms. If a word used in the documentation is not defined here, it is being used in its ordinary sense.