GLOSSARY
The words operators use, defined properly.
Twelve terms that come up in every operations conversation in South African food and produce — each defined in a sentence you can quote, then explained in the context of a business that buys, holds and delivers stock.
A–Z
12 terms, defined in one sentence each.
The full entry on each page adds what the term means for a business that buys, holds and delivers stock in South Africa, and one worked example of the finding it produces.
- Debtors ageingALSO: AGED RECEIVABLES · DEBTORS AGE ANALYSIS
- A debtors ageing groups everything your customers owe you by how long it has been outstanding — current, 30, 60, 90 days and older.
- Delivery-note reconciliationALSO: THREE-WAY MATCH · GRN MATCHING
- Delivery-note reconciliation is the check that what a supplier invoiced you for is what actually came off the truck.
- Fractional COOALSO: PART-TIME COO · OUTSOURCED OPERATIONS DIRECTOR
- A fractional COO is a chief operating officer you hire for part of a week rather than full time — typically a few days a month on a retainer, to run or repair the operating side of a business that cannot justify an executive salary.
- Gross margin vs markup
- Gross margin and markup describe the same rand of profit against two different bases.
- Invoice line itemALSO: LINE-LEVEL DETAIL
- An invoice line item is a single row on a supplier invoice: the item, the quantity, the unit, the unit price and the line total.
- Money leakageALSO: MARGIN LEAKAGE · PROFIT LEAKAGE
- Money leakage is what a business loses through small, repeated, unplanned gaps rather than through one visible failure — a price increase nobody checked, a delivery two crates short, an invoice paid twice, stock written off with no reason attached.
- Operations auditALSO: OPERATIONAL AUDIT · OPS REVIEW
- An operations audit is a fixed-scope review of how a business actually runs — what it buys, what it holds, what it invoices, what it is owed, and how long each of those takes — carried out against real documents rather than a conversation.
- POPIAALSO: PROTECTION OF PERSONAL INFORMATION ACT
- POPIA is the Protection of Personal Information Act, South Africa's data-protection law, in force since 2021.
- Price creepALSO: PRICE DRIFT · SUPPLIER CREEP
- Price creep is the slow, unannounced upward drift of supplier prices — a few percent at a time, spread across months and across line items, on invoices that are otherwise entirely correct.
- Stock cover daysALSO: DAYS OF COVER · DAYS ON HAND
- Stock cover days is how many days of trading your current stock will last at your recent rate of use: divide the quantity you hold of an item by its average daily usage.
- VAT-inclusive pricingALSO: VAT-INCLUSIVE VS EX-VAT
- A VAT-inclusive price already contains value-added tax.
- Weekly briefALSO: WEEKLY OPERATIONS REPORT · MONDAY BRIEF
- A weekly brief is a short, fixed-format summary of how the operation ran last week and what needs a decision this week, sent on a schedule, in the same shape every time, to the people who can act on it.
Start with a one-week Operations Audit.
R2,000, credited to your first month. We tell you where the money is leaking — whether you sign or not.