Glossary

Making a machine do a chore that repeats identically: reading exports, typing invoices, sending reminders. In an independent business the point is never headcount, it is giving the owner's evenings back. A good automation does one clear job and can name the number it moves.

The password that lets a tool use a paid AI service, and that decides who receives the bill. A key in your name means the service bills you directly, a few dollars a month at the scale of an independent business, and keeps working whoever built the tool. Whose name is on the key is the quickest test of who really owns a tool.

A buying model where the tool is built, delivered and paid one time, then belongs to the client. The builder earns by finishing, not by staying. Its honest fine print: small third-party running costs, named before signing, stay with the client.

A buying model where you rent access and the exit is the expensive part. Honest for genuinely shared infrastructure run as a full-time trade, like a till or an accounting platform. A toll when applied to work that was done once for one house.

The file a point of sale produces on request: one line per sale, with item, quantity, price, time and address. Three to six months of it is the raw material of a margin analysis, costs five minutes to pull, and commits you to nothing.

Reading a menu as a portfolio: each dish judged on popularity and margin together, then pushed, repriced, reworked or quietly retired. The craft is in having real recipe costs, since sales alone flatter the popular and hide the expensive.

What the ingredients of a dish cost, usually read as a share of its price. The half of margin analysis that the till does not know, which is why a serious margin report asks for recipe costs, even approximate ones.

Revenue divided by number of tickets: what the typical visit spends. Useful mostly in comparison, between addresses, services or seasons, where a stable gap is a question worth asking of the data.

A reserved table nobody claims. Mostly forgetting rather than malice, which is why a well-timed reminder with a one-word exit converts a share of them into cancellations that arrive in time to resell the table.

One clean, deduplicated list of the people who already chose your house, drawn from reservations, receipts and messages, with consent recorded. Owned in your storage, it is the cheapest audience in your marketing and the only one that came in person.

A message to your own clients who have gone quiet, written as attention rather than promotion. The highest-yield send in an independent business, because it draws on a relationship instead of an auction.

One screen where the numbers that run the house live: sales, average ticket, costs, gaps between addresses. Useful when it updates from an export you drop in; decorative when it demands its own data entry, which is a second job wearing a screen.

A tool that reads supplier PDFs from a folder and writes a clean file for the accountant plus a running view of costs. It flags what it could not read confidently instead of guessing, which keeps the human check to minutes.

The number a tool agrees to be judged on: hours of typing gone, tables saved, reviews answered, margin found. A tool that cannot name its meter is decoration. The meter is read on the client's own data, on day 30, together.

The written voice of a house: how it says thank you, how it apologizes, what it never says, in both languages. Set once with the owner, it is what keeps assistant-drafted replies sounding like the house instead of like software.