Operations glossary
Plain definitions for the terms that come up when you run orders, inventory, and fulfillment on one system.
Operations platform
The software that runs the operational middle of a business, between the storefront and the accounting ledger.
An operations platform handles what happens after an order is placed and before it reaches the books: allocating stock, picking and shipping, purchasing replacements, invoicing, and keeping one customer record across channels.
It sits deliberately between two systems most businesses already own and intend to keep. The storefront takes the money. The ledger reports on it. The operations platform runs everything in between.
Omni is an operations platform. It syncs with the Shopify storefront and the QuickBooks or Xero ledger a business already uses rather than replacing either.
Back office
The internal systems that fulfil and account for sales, as opposed to the storefront that captures them.
The back office covers inventory, fulfilment, purchasing, customer records, and billing. None of it is visible to a shopper, and all of it determines whether an order actually arrives.
Businesses usually assemble a back office out of point tools before consolidating it. The cost of that assembly is rarely the licence fees. It is the reconciliation work between tools that disagree.
ERP (enterprise resource planning)
A category of software that unifies finance, operations, and often manufacturing in a single system of record.
ERP grew out of manufacturing resource planning, so most established ERP products carry a general ledger and a bill-of-materials engine. Implementations are typically measured in quarters and priced per user.
Buyers often search for "ERP" when what they need is the operational half without the finance and manufacturing halves. That distinction matters, because the two shapes of product are bought, priced, and implemented very differently.
Omni is not an ERP. It has no general ledger and no manufacturing or MRP module, and it reports to an accounting system rather than replacing one.
Order management
Tracking an order from capture through allocation, fulfilment, and invoicing, across every channel it can arrive on.
Order management is the spine of an operations platform. It decides which location fills an order, what happens when stock runs short, and which state an order is in at any moment.
Multi-channel selling is what turns it from a spreadsheet job into a systems job. Once the same item can be sold in store, online, and on a wholesale account, one shared view of committed stock becomes the difference between overselling and not.
Order management is available on every Omni plan, including retail, POS, work-order, and quote flows.
Point of sale (POS)
The in-person selling surface where a counter sale is rung up, paid for, and receipted.
A POS is judged on speed at the counter and on whether the sale it records immediately affects the same inventory the rest of the business sees.
POS that keeps its own separate stock count is the most common source of an oversell, because the online channel is selling against a number the counter has already spent.
POS is on every Omni plan and writes to the same inventory records as every other channel.
Inventory management
Knowing what stock exists, where it sits, what is committed, and what needs reordering.
Useful inventory management distinguishes between stock on hand and stock available to promise. The gap between those two numbers is everything already committed to open orders.
Across multiple locations the question becomes harder: the same SKU can be plentiful in one stockroom and out entirely in another, and the answer a customer gets should depend on where their order will be filled from.
Inventory management is on every Omni plan. Advanced multi-location controls arrive at the Power tier.
Available to promise
Stock on hand minus everything already committed to open orders, which is the only number safe to sell against.
On hand is a warehouse fact. Available to promise is a sales fact. Selling against the first is how a business accepts an order it cannot fill.
The number changes whenever an order is placed, cancelled, or shipped, which is why it has to be derived by the system rather than maintained by hand.
Reorder point
The stock level at which an item should be reordered so replacement arrives before it runs out.
A reorder point is a function of how fast an item sells and how long a supplier takes to deliver. Set it from lead time and demand rather than from a round number that felt right once.
The point of automating it is not the calculation. It is that nobody has to notice the item is running low.
Omni surfaces items below their reorder point and can carry them into a purchase order. Purchasing starts at the Grow tier.
Stock count (cycle count)
Physically counting stock and reconciling the result against what the system believed was there.
A full count closes the business for a day. A cycle count checks a slice at a time on a rotation, so accuracy is maintained continuously instead of being restored once a year.
The value is in the variance, not the count. A variance that keeps recurring in one location or one category is usually a process problem rather than a counting problem.
Stock count worksheets are on every Omni plan.
Fulfillment
Picking, packing, and shipping an order once it has been allocated stock.
Fulfilment is where operational cost concentrates. Pick paths, box selection, and carrier choice each move the per-order cost more than most software line items do.
It is also where an order most visibly fails. A customer forgives a slow confirmation email far more readily than a wrong item in the box.
Fulfilment and warehouse management, including zone picking and multi-box shipping, begin at the Power tier.
Warehouse management (WMS)
Directing the physical work inside a warehouse: where stock lives, how it is picked, and in what sequence.
A WMS earns its place when the walking starts to cost real money. Zone picking, batch picking, and sensible put-away rules exist to shorten the route a picker takes.
Small operations rarely need one. The threshold is usually the point where two pickers start colliding, or where finding an item takes longer than packing it.
Warehouse management is a Power-tier capability in Omni. Rate shopping, fulfilment analytics, and 3PL integration are Elite.
Third-party logistics (3PL)
An outside provider that stores and ships stock on a business’s behalf.
Outsourcing to a 3PL trades fixed warehouse cost for a per-order fee and removes direct control of the pick. The integration question becomes the important one: stock levels and shipment status have to flow back accurately, or the business is blind to its own inventory.
3PL integration is available on the Elite tier.
Purchase order (PO)
A formal order to a supplier, recording what was ordered, at what price, and what has since arrived.
A purchase order matters after it is sent. Receiving against it is what catches a short shipment, a substituted item, or a price that moved between quote and invoice.
The three-way match between the order, the receipt, and the supplier bill is the control that stops a business paying for goods it never got.
Purchasing, vendor management, and receiving start at the Grow tier, alongside supplier bills.
Accounts receivable (AR)
Money owed to the business by its customers, and the work of collecting it.
AR becomes a discipline the moment a business sells on terms rather than on payment. Aging buckets, credit limits, and dunning reminders exist to make collection routine instead of awkward.
It is felt most acutely in wholesale, where a single account can carry more outstanding balance than a month of retail takings.
Accounts receivable, including aging, credit holds, and payment reminders, starts at the Scale tier.
Accounts payable (AP)
Money the business owes its suppliers, tracked against what was ordered and received.
AP is the mirror of receivable, and its main risk is paying twice or paying for something that never arrived. Recording bills against their purchase orders is what prevents both.
Supplier bills are recorded against purchase orders from the Grow tier.
B2B portal
A self-service ordering site for trade customers, showing their own negotiated pricing.
A trade buyer wants to reorder without emailing anyone. A portal gives them their catalogue, their prices, their order history, and their outstanding balance.
It is distinct from a consumer storefront in one important way: nothing on it is public, and what each account sees depends on the terms agreed with them.
The B2B portal, with wholesale and contract pricing, is a Power-tier capability.
Wholesale and contract pricing
Account-specific price lists, so what a customer pays depends on who they are.
Wholesale pricing sets tiers by volume or customer class. Contract pricing goes further and fixes agreed prices for a named account over a period.
The failure mode is manual: a price list maintained in a spreadsheet drifts from the one the system charges, and the difference is discovered by the customer.
Wholesale pricing, contract pricing, and promotions all begin at the Power tier.
Backorder
An order accepted for stock that has not arrived yet, to be filled when it does.
A backorder is a promise with a date attached. It stays acceptable to a customer for exactly as long as the date holds and someone tells them when it moves.
Aging backorders are worth watching as a group. A queue that keeps growing usually points at a supplier problem rather than a demand one.
Backorder aging alerts and reminders are available from the Scale tier.
Work order
A job to be performed rather than an item to be shipped: a repair, a service call, or a build.
A work order tracks labour and parts against a job, and moves through stages rather than straight to dispatch. Service businesses run on them the way retailers run on sales orders.
Consuming parts from the same inventory the rest of the business sells is what keeps a service arm from quietly running its own stockroom.
Work orders, including optional per-technician labour timing, start at the Grow tier.
Layaway
Holding goods for a customer who pays in instalments before taking them.
Layaway needs three rules written down before it is offered: the deposit, the payment schedule, and what happens if the customer stops paying. Held stock is stock that cannot be sold to anyone else.
Layaway with configurable deposits, terms, and forfeiture rules starts at the Grow tier.
SKU (stock keeping unit)
The identifier for one distinct sellable item, down to size, colour, and variant.
A SKU is the unit everything else counts in. Get the granularity wrong and every downstream number inherits the error: two colours sharing a SKU cannot be counted, reordered, or sold accurately.
Flat-rate pricing
Software priced per tier rather than per user, so adding staff does not raise the bill.
Per-user pricing charges a business for growing. It also creates a quiet incentive to share logins, which undermines any audit trail the software keeps.
Flat-rate pricing moves the cost driver to capability instead of headcount, which suits operations software specifically, because operations software is used by everybody rather than by a licensed few.
Omni is flat-rate on every tier. Four tiers publish a monthly price and Elite starts at $999 and is quoted from there according to the infrastructure a deployment needs.
Longer guides on these topics live in the Learning Center.
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