POS and supply-store glossary

Running a supply store means living with a vocabulary that spans the counter, the back office, and the vendor relationships behind both. This glossary defines the point-of-sale, ERP, payments, inventory, and AI terms we hear most often from independent store owners, in plain English and without the jargon. If a term you need is missing, book a demo and ask us directly.

Point of sale and store operations

Point of sale (POS): The system at the counter where a store checks out customers, takes payment, and records the transaction. In a supply store it also handles quotes, special orders, and charge account purchases.
ERP (enterprise resource planning): The software that runs the back office, tying inventory, purchasing, pricing, accounting, and customer records into one system so the numbers stay consistent across the whole business.
General ledger (GL): The central accounting record where every financial transaction lands, from a cash sale to a vendor bill, giving the owner an accurate picture of the store's finances without exporting to a separate program.
Cloud-based POS: A point of sale that runs in a web browser with data stored securely online rather than on one computer in the back room, so it works from any device and nothing is lost if a machine fails.
SKU (stock keeping unit): The unique code a store assigns to each product it sells, used to track inventory, pricing, and sales history for that specific item.
Omnichannel: Selling across more than one channel, such as the in-store counter and an online store, while keeping inventory, pricing, and customer records in sync across all of them.

Supply-store workflows

Contractor charge account: A house account that lets a trade customer, such as a painter or builder, buy on credit and settle up later against agreed terms and pricing.
House account: A store-managed line of credit for a regular customer, billed on a statement rather than paid in full at the counter.
Net terms: The agreed period a customer has to pay an invoice, such as net 30, meaning payment is due within 30 days of the sale.
Statement: A periodic summary of a charge account customer's purchases, credits, and balance due, sent so they can pay what they owe.
Will-call: An order a customer has bought or reserved and will pick up later, held at the store under their name.
Special order: A product a store does not stock but orders from a vendor on a customer's behalf, common for specific colors, sizes, or trade items.
Color matching: Reading an existing color and reproducing its tint formula so a customer can buy more paint that matches what they already have on the wall.
Tinting: Adding colorant to a paint base to produce a specific color, driven by a formula from a color catalog such as Benjamin Moore or Sherwin-Williams.
Unit of measure conversion: Selling a product in a different unit than it is purchased in, such as buying fencing by the roll and selling it by the foot, or buying feed by the pallet and selling it by the bag.
By-weight pricing: Pricing bulk goods such as seed, feed, soil, or loose fasteners by their measured weight at the point of sale rather than as fixed packaged units.

Payments and receivables

Integrated payments: Card acceptance built directly into the POS, so a sale and its payment are one step and one record rather than a separate terminal and a separate reconciliation at the end of the day.
Accounts receivable (AR): The money customers owe a store for purchases made on account, tracked from the sale until it is paid.
AR aging: A breakdown of outstanding customer balances by how overdue they are, used to see at a glance which accounts need a phone call.
Autopay: A setup where a charge account customer's balance is paid automatically from a saved payment method when the statement comes due.
Tax exemption certificate: Documentation that a customer, such as a reseller or a farm, is exempt from sales tax, stored so the exemption is applied correctly every time they buy.

Inventory and purchasing

Purchase order (PO): A document a store sends a vendor to order products, listing quantities, costs, and terms, and used to receive and reconcile the shipment when it arrives.
Vendor catalog: A supplier's list of products, prices, and codes loaded into the POS so items can be looked up, priced, and ordered without manual entry.
Reorder point: The stock level at which a product should be reordered so it does not run out before the next delivery arrives.
Cycle count: Counting a subset of inventory on a rolling schedule to keep stock accurate without shutting the store for a full physical count.
Buying group: A cooperative or wholesaler, such as the member-owned Do It Best and True Value or the independent wholesaler Orgill, that pools independent stores' purchasing power for better pricing and shared vendor catalogs.
Co-op: A member-owned cooperative, such as Do It Best or True Value, in which the independent stores themselves own the organization that negotiates vendor pricing, operates distribution centers, and publishes the catalogs and price files its members order against. That ownership structure is what separates a co-op from an independent wholesaler such as Orgill, which sells to stores it has no membership relationship with.
EDI (electronic data interchange): The standard machine-readable format stores and their vendors use to exchange purchase orders, invoices, and shipping notices directly between systems, so an order placed at the counter arrives in the vendor's system without anyone re-keying it and the shipment comes back as a document to confirm rather than a stack of paper to type.

Systems buyers are comparing

Epicor Eagle: A long-running retail management and point-of-sale system from Epicor, widely installed in independent hardware, lumber, and farm stores, and traditionally run on a server in the back room rather than in a browser. Stores weighing it against a cloud system can see what a migration involves on our Epicor Eagle switch page.
Legacy POS: Any point of sale tied to specific hardware in the store, where upgrades arrive as an install rather than automatically and remote access depends on a separate connection into that machine. The term describes the deployment model rather than the age of the software.

AI and analytics

Dooey: The assistant built into every Rundoo screen, organized around three jobs: analyze the store's data, act on the owner's behalf, and automate routine work.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Structuring a website's content so AI answer engines can read it and cite it accurately when a buyer asks a question, the AI-era counterpart to search engine optimization.

Book a demo Read the buyer guides