The words, defined.
The terms used across this site, explained without selling anything. A definition that only works to persuade stops working to explain.
Autonomous retail
Cashierless store
A shop where the customer walks in, takes what they want and pays with nobody at a till: identification, scanning and payment are handled by the system itself.
There are two families. Computer-vision systems recognise what the customer picks up through cameras and shelf sensors, which requires rebuilding the whole store and is expensive. Self-scanning systems have the customer scan the barcode with their own phone, work on an existing space and lower the barrier considerably. The second is what we use.
See it in detailVademecum and dosing
Digital vademecum
A laboratory's product catalogue turned into rules the system applies: it does not display a posology text, it computes the dose that applies to a specific case.
The difference from a PDF is not the format, it is that computation happens. For a 340 kg animal it returns the exact millilitres, warns how many injection sites are needed if the per-site cap is exceeded, states how many animals the vial covers and turns the withdrawal time into a concrete date. A PDF leaves all of that to the mental arithmetic of whoever is in the pen.
See it in detailDose audit
Automated verification that every dosing rule is correct, run across four independent planes: structure, coding against the source, pharmacology and practical viability.
The pharmacological plane is what separates an audit from a spellcheck: it reconstructs mg/kg from the product composition and contrasts it with the therapeutic range, so a rule transcribed perfectly but out of range still fails. In our implementation the audit audits itself with a mutation test: 559 errors injected, 556 detected, 99.5%.
See it in detailWithdrawal time
The period that must elapse between an animal's last treatment and the moment its meat, milk or eggs may enter the human food chain.
It is set by the product's health registration and varies by species and by output: the same medicine can have one period for meat and a different one for milk. A useful system turns it into a slaughter or milk-delivery date, not a number of days to count by hand from the treatment.
Tax by country
CFDI
The Mexican digital fiscal receipt: an XML file that is only valid once a SAT-authorised provider seals it and returns a unique identifier.
The consequence for software is that the invoice is not issued, it is requested: the system depends on a third party that can fail, stall or answer twice. Collecting in instalments also requires issuing a separate payment receipt for each payment, and cancelling a sealed one needs a reason and, in many cases, the recipient's approval.
See it in detailGross income tax (IIBB)
An Argentine turnover tax settled province by province rather than nationally: there are twenty-four jurisdictions with their own rates.
When selling across provinces, the base is apportioned through the Multilateral Agreement. For software this means a calculation with a single rate applied nationwide is wrong by design. On top of that, gateways and collection agents apply withholdings and surcharges that arrive later: the money landing in the account is not the sale amount, and that difference is a tax credit, not a loss.
See it in detailSupporting document
In Colombia, the receipt a buyer must issue when purchasing from a supplier not required to invoice electronically.
It is the document most systems brought in from abroad do not contemplate, because it does not exist in the countries they benchmark against. Without it the expense is not deductible: a company can invoice impeccably what it sells and be unable to deduct much of what it buys.
See it in detailGapless sequential numbering
The requirement that invoices in a series carry consecutive numbers with no gaps, even when an operation is cancelled halfway.
It looks trivial and stops being so the moment two processes invoice at once: if each requests a number on its own and one later fails, a gap remains that has to be explained. The correct approach assigns the number inside the same transaction that creates the invoice, so either both happen or neither does. With hash chaining — where each record depends on the previous one — it stops being optional.
See it in detailEngineering
PWA (progressive web app)
A web application that installs on a phone like a native app and works offline, without going through the App Store or Google Play.
It matters when the user works where there is no signal — a pen, a field, a warehouse — and cannot depend on the network responding. It also avoids the app-store review cycle: a fix is published and available instantly, with no approval to wait for.
Idempotency
The property that repeating an operation produces the same result as performing it once. In a payment it means a retry does not charge twice.
It is what prevents double charging when the network fails right after the request is sent and the customer taps again. It is implemented with a unique operation identifier the server remembers: if it arrives twice, the second returns the first's result instead of executing another charge. The same technique applies to invoice stamping in Mexico, which also depends on a third party that can answer twice.
Multi-tenant
A single software installation serving several companies while keeping their data fully separated, so that none can see another's.
The risk is isolation: a single query that forgets to filter by company is enough for one client to see another's data. The robust fix is not remembering the filter everywhere, but a centralised guard applying it by default at every entry point. In one of our panels that is 121 API handlers covered by the same guard.
GEO (generative engine optimisation)
The work of getting an AI assistant to cite your site when answering, which is not the same as ranking in a list of results.
It changes two things relative to classic SEO. First, content has to be in the HTML the server returns: AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript, so anything injected client-side does not exist for them. Second, the citable format is the self-contained passage — a definition, a figure with its source, a direct answer — rather than the sales paragraph.
Is a term missing?
If there is something in your project you do not know the name for, write to us and we will clear it up — and it will probably end up here.
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