Concepts and Terms
Imagine a chain with three outlets. Head office wants one menu and one profit statement; each outlet keeps its own cash drawers, its own kitchen and its own closing time — and the night outlet doesn't finish until 2 a.m. the next calendar date. MahirRMS models exactly this.
Business and branch
A business is the company: menu, chart of accounts, roles, and business-wide settings live here. A branch is one location of that business: registers, printers, stock and the day close belong to the branch. Reports can be viewed per branch or consolidated for the business.
Most settings say clearly whether they apply to the business or a single branch — check before assuming a change affects every outlet.
The business day
A branch has a shop start time. The business day runs from that time to the same time next day, so a sale at 1:30 a.m. still belongs to yesterday's business day if your day starts at 5:00 a.m. Every daily figure — sales, consumption, day close — is grouped by business day, not calendar date. This is why closing the day at 1 a.m. does not split your night sales in half.
Shifts
A shift names a working window: Morning, Evening, Night. Shifts belong to the business — every branch uses the same list. Orders, registers and day closes are stamped with the shift they happened in, so you can compare Monday mornings across branches. A shift can be configured to allow closing while delivery orders are still on the road (typical for a morning shift that hands over to evening).
Registers
A cash register is one cashier's drawer for one shift: it opens with a float, records every cash movement, and closes with a counted amount. The system always knows what should be in the drawer; closing is where counted meets expected. Registers are personal — two cashiers means two registers, and each answers for their own drawer.
Users, roles and authorizations
Users sign in with a password (and optionally a PIN or RFID card for quick actions). Roles bundle permissions. On top of permissions, certain sensitive actions — discounts, register close visibility, charge edits — can require a second person's authorization: the cashier asks a listed manager to enter their credentials on the spot. See Users & Permissions for the full model.
The pattern to remember: permissions decide what you can open; authorizations decide what you can change alone.
Glossary
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Business day | The 24 hours starting at the branch's shop start time — the unit all daily figures group by. |
| Float | The starting cash issued to a register when it opens. |
| KOT | Kitchen order ticket — the per-department slip that tells a kitchen station what to cook. |
| Running order | An order placed but not yet fully paid and completed. |
| Recipe | The ingredient list one sold unit of a menu item consumes. |
| Consumption | The automatic conversion of a day's sales into ingredient usage, run at day close. |
| Day close | The formal end of a business day: checks, cash counting, consumption, commit. |
| Variance | The difference between counted and expected — used for both cash drawers and stock counts. |
| Voucher | A manual accounting entry (payment, receipt, journal, expense). |
| Control account | One ledger head holding a whole class of balances (e.g. all customer receivables), with per-party detail in a sub-ledger. |
| Sub-ledger | The per-party breakdown under a control account; always sums to the control balance. |
| Authorizer | A person on a branch's list who may sign for a guarded action. |