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What it does

Every capability, at overview level, in plain words — written from the live registry the engine serves, and checked against the code before it was published. Where a line names the states a record moves through, every state is a real one. For what has a screen today, read What's live.

On this page:

• Part 1 — The platform: what the engine does, for any screen or assistant.
• Part 2 — The back office: the screens our own people use.
• Part 3 — The register: the point of sale in the browser.

Part 1 — The platform

What the engine does, for any screen or assistant: every line below runs in full through the open API, the command line and your assistant, whether or not a screen for it exists yet.

Catalog and variants

• Styles with sizes, colours and any option you define; one record for the style, one for every variant, with barcodes (UPC, EAN and case codes), SKUs and PLUs, the maker's part numbers and each supplier's item number.
• Categories in a tree, with merchandise divisions the way your floor is organised; brands, seasons, collections and tags as their own records.
• Size-and-colour grids: enter a whole style's quantities in one grid, not one line at a time — on purchase orders, receiving, counts, transfers, supplier returns and transfer requests, with a stock matrix view on every style.
• Supplier item records with each supplier's cost, pack size, minimum and lead time, in the supplier's currency.
• Every product can be tried dry: the engine rehearses a create or update and lists the refusals before anything is written.

Pricing, price lists and promotions

• Selling prices as dated windows: what it sells at, from when to when — the windows are the permanent price history, never overwritten.
• Price lists for a customer group — members, staff, wholesale, whichever you define — or one trade customer's own contract with its term.
• A future window can be cancelled before it starts; when the last window lapses with no successor the item is off sale — a stale price is never left behind.
• Promotions: percentage, amount, fixed price, buy-X-get-Y and bundle offers, with the rules written once and applied at the till.
• Markdown plans: draft → scheduled → active → completed, over a product scope you name — a category, a season, a brand, a style — in up to eight dated steps, each a percentage, an amount or a fixed price; scheduling the plan writes every future price window at once.
• Several currencies, with the exchange rates kept as records.

Stock, locations and counts

• Stock by store, warehouse, zone and bin; the quantity on hand, reserved, in transit, held and damaged kept apart, and what is on order beside them.
• Stock counts: draft → counting → pending review → posted; count a bin, a zone or a whole store, blind against a snapshot taken at the start, with the variances reviewed before they post.
• Adjustments with a reason on every one — damage, shrink, found stock — and the person who made it.
• Minimum and maximum levels, safety stock and days of supply, set for the company or one store, a category or one style, a season, a brand — the most specific rule wins.
• Every movement on a permanent, readable log: what moved, where, when, by whom.

Purchasing and receiving

• Purchase orders: draft → pending approval → issued → acknowledged → partially received → received, or closed short, or cancelled.
• Order minimums — in packs where the supplier sells by the pack — checked as the order is written, not after the goods arrive; the supplier's lead time sets the expected arrival date.
• Receipts against the order, line by line; a short delivery leaves the order open until the rest arrives or you close it short, and more than was ordered is refused at the door.
• Supplier invoices captured against the receipts and matched three ways — ordered, received, invoiced — flagged when they differ, never blocked.
• Returns to vendor: draft → approved → shipped → credited.
• Landed cost: the freight, duty and other components estimated as the goods are received and carried into every unit's average cost; the supplier's invoice trues them up.

Transfers and replenishment

• A store's transfer requests: draft → submitted → open → fulfilled, or closed short.
• Transfers: draft → ready → in transit → received, with an approval on sending and on receiving where you want one, a partial receipt when the box is short, and a dispute path when the box does not match the paper.
• Transfer lanes between locations: by distance unless you say otherwise — a lane you prefer, rank or forbid, with a cost hint for the buy-or-transfer call.
• Replenishment suggestions from your own rules and your real sales, store by store, ready to become requests.
• Rebalancing between stores: the engine finds genuine excess in one store and a real gap in another before it suggests a move.

The planning desks

• The pull desk: what each store needs by its own rules and its real sales, netted against what is already requested or on its way.
• The push desk: how an arriving delivery is shared across the stores by their weights, in whole units, after the centre's own target and reserve are kept back.
• The buy desk: what to order from which supplier, rounded up to packs and minimums, when a transfer cannot cover the gap.
• The lane ranking and the ABC classes: which store should donate to which, and which items are your A, B and C sellers by their own velocity.
• Open-to-buy and the markdown ladder are worked by your assistant over the same records, every price and plan rehearsed before you confirm — two of the worked examples show it.
• Every desk answers in whole units, shows its reasons, and creates nothing until you say so.

Sales, orders and the counter's paperwork

• Orders: open → held → placed → completed, with voids and cancellations kept as facts, never deleted.
• Layaways (open → placed → accruing → paid in full → completed), special orders (open → placed → sourcing → ready → completed) and quotes (draft → sent → accepted).
• Returns with a reason, against the original sale, line by line, with the refund method — the original tender, cash or store credit — chosen at the counter.
• Appointments and bookable resources, for services and order pickups.
• Invoices, credit notes and debit notes for the trade customer who pays on account.

Payments, tenders and refunds

• Cash, card, foreign cash, gift card, gift certificate, store credit and on-account tenders, split across several on one sale.
• Card payments through Stripe: created → authorised → captured, kept as separate states so a failed capture never shows as paid.
• Refunds to the original tender, partial or whole; disputes: needs response → under review → won, lost or accepted.
• Stored value: gift cards, gift certificates and store credit as instruments with a balance and a history.
• The engine's own checks raise fraud alerts: open → acknowledged → confirmed or dismissed — void and no-sale patterns, return abuse, discount overrides, cash over and short, chargebacks.

Fulfilment and shipping

• Each order's fulfilment: pending → picking → packed → shipped or ready for pickup → fulfilled.
• Ship with a carrier, or hold for pickup in the store or at the kerb, with the stock reserved when the order is placed.
• Partial fulfilment when only some lines are ready; the rest stays open and visible.
• An order placed by an AI shopping assistant is a sale on the same books as a counter sale, fulfilled the same way.

Customers, loyalty and segments

• Customer records with contact details, consents and their purchases — how many, the first and the last, the spend by currency.
• Loyalty points earned and redeemed at the till, with multipliers, bonus windows and tiers yours to set.
• Customer price groups and corporate customers with their own terms.
• Segments by real behaviour — recent buyers, frequent buyers, big spenders, a loyalty tier, an interest, a consent — refreshed on demand from the records, or fixed lists you keep by hand.
• Privacy requests (received → verified → fulfilled) handled as records, not emails — access, erasure, portability, rectification, opt-out.

Taxes and fiscal records

• Tax jurisdictions, rates and registrations as records; the right rate by location and product class.
• Tax-exempt customers with their exemption certificates and expiry dates.
• Fiscal receipts, where a country requires them, as records that never change once issued — numbered without gaps and signed by a certified partner; no country's partner is connected yet, so the issue is refused honestly until one is.
• Returns carry the tax back line by line, prorated from the original sale, with the audit trail intact.

Reports, dashboards and exports

• Twenty-four ready-made reports — sales, stock, purchasing, margins, sell-through, shrink, returns by reason, the Z report — by store, day, style, category or brand.
• A report builder over any record type your role can read — columns, or groups with counts and sums — run on screen or as a file, saved and shared.
• Dashboards with the day's numbers and the trend, a starting layout per role.
• Every list, grid and record downloads as CSV or JSON; a whole set arrives as a file in your notices.
• Data feeds to your accountant's or your own tools, daily, weekly or monthly.

Your assistant, connectors and selling to AI shoppers

• Connect Claude, ChatGPT or your own assistant — in one click, one command, or by hand; it works within the permissions you give, Read or Read and make changes, and a change is shown to you as a rehearsal first.
• The same 1,000+ operations on one open API, the command-line tool and the assistant connector — never a subset.
• AI shopping assistants buy from your shop over the open standard for assistant shopping — the Universal Commerce Protocol, UCP — on your terms: what is listed, at what prices, where you ship, which platforms may buy.
• Webhooks and plugins so other systems hear about events as they happen.
• Aldric, the built-in consultant, for any user on any screen.

People, roles and training

• Seven starting roles — owner, system administrator, manager, associate manager, warehouse associate, sales associate, cashier — with the permissions that fit each, and roles of your own; approval requests where a step needs a second pair of eyes, never your own.
• Devices paired to the shop with a code; till sessions opened, suspended, counted and closed by named people.
• A handbook and a course per role built from its plays; tests with sittings and certificates on record; the owner can require a certificate for a role, due within days of the grant.
• When the course behind a certificate changes, the people who hold it are told to refresh.
• Every write attributed to who made it — a person, a device, an API key or an assistant platform — and when.

Billing, the permanent record and your exit

• $15 a month for your whole business; the meter in plain kernels you can read any time; bulk top-ups that cost less per million.
• One permanent log of everything that happened — every change an event, with who made it and when — the record the screens and reports are rebuilt from.
• The covenant: your data is yours — never sold, never used for advertising, never used to train AI models; nothing is held behind our screens, and everything exports through the open API and the downloads.
• When you need something altered that the rules protect, a change request: submitted → in review → approved → realised.
• What's new, from the day your organisation started: every change to the platform told in plain words.

Part 2 — The back office

The screens our own people use, built on the same operations as everything above.

The way every screen works

• One grid for every list: sort by any column, a heading that stays put, choose and resize columns, remembered for you.
• Type to narrow any long list, a column filter on every heading, and a search box that finds a document by its number first.
• One button turns any record into a readable, printable document.
• Download on every list, grid and record — CSV, JSON, or the whole set as a file.
• Show more, one row under every list — no page numbers to learn.

Records and their next steps

• A record's page offers its next steps as buttons, dimmed with the reason when this session may not take them; a step the record's state does not allow is refused by the engine, never half-done.
• The history of every record, who did what and when, on the same page.
• Size-and-colour matrices for entering quantities across a whole style.
• Notes with attached files on the record they belong to, scanned before anyone opens them.
• Plain-words refusals: what was refused, why, what to do next, and the code with its reference on a small ledger line for support.

Wizards and drafting with the built-in intelligence

• Hand the wizard a price list, a supplier sheet or product photos — PDF, image, text or CSV — and it drafts the fields for you to check.
• A conversation that fills a form: say what you want in your own words and review the draft before it is written.
• Rehearse first: a create or update can be tried dry and shows the refusals before anything is saved.
• Guided steps on long tasks, with the materials you handed in kept at hand.
• Journeys that walk a new person through a whole task end to end.

Guidance on every page

• A Guide tab on every screen: how you use it, what this is, when you use it, an example — and, folded, what you see, what you can do, what can go wrong, and the related pages.
• Aldric, the built-in consultant, answers in context — from “how do I receive this?” to “how do I run my shop better?”
• Plays: ready-made sequences for the common jobs of each role.
• A Start page per role: your role's common tasks and your training, nothing else.
• Plain English throughout, one meaning per word, the same word everywhere.

Dashboards and reports in the office

• The dashboard first: today's numbers, the trend, what needs attention.
• A feed of the records you follow, bubbled up when something moves on them.
• What's new: the platform's changes since your organisation started, in plain words.
• Saved reports and the report builder for any family your role can read.
• Charts in one dress everywhere — light or dark, on a phone or a desk.

Training and certificates in the office

• The handbook, read in the office or printed.
• Courses per role built from the plays people actually run.
• Tests with sittings and certificates on record, and a standing badge on the register.
• The owner can require a certificate for a role, due within days of the grant; up to five sittings a day.
• The tutor under every lesson, and practice sittings with no certificate at stake.

People, roles and the organisation

• Add staff, assign roles, see who holds which permissions.
• Approval requests when a step needs a manager.
• Several stores and warehouses under one organisation, or several organisations under one group.
• Devices paired and managed from the office.
• Connect your AI assistant from the office, choosing Read or Read and make changes.

Your account and your money

• The meter in plain words: what each task drew and when.
• Top up kernels in bulk; buy once, keep them for good — the bought ones never expire.
• Every charge on record — the monthly fee, a support plan, a support incident — and every kernel purchase.
• Notices: an export finished, training due, a certificate issued, a verification pending, a low balance, a fraud alert, a release for your role.
• The covenant and the sealed support trail, word for word the Privacy Policy's, where you can read them.

Part 3 — The register

The point of sale in the browser: inside the back office, on a paired device, selling, taking cash and card, handling returns, opening and closing the till.

Ringing a sale

• Scan or type a barcode, a SKU or a PLU, search, or pick from the style's size-and-colour grid; the price is the store's own for that item.
• Promotions and sale prices apply themselves, a coupon code is typed; every discount shows on the line with its reason.
• Hold a sale and come back to it; several open sales per till, and an open cart survives a reload.
• A staff discount on the whole sale, for a named employee, at the percent your policy allows.
• A printable receipt for every sale.

Taking payment

• Cash, card — on a connected reader or recorded from your own terminal — foreign cash at a quoted rate, a gift card, a gift certificate or store credit; a split across several.
• Authorise and capture kept apart on the payment record, so a failed capture never shows as paid.
• Change due, the rounding note and a tip where they apply.
• Refunds to the original tender, in cash or as store credit, from the register's return screen.
• A return starts from the original sale's number.

Returns

• Return against the original sale, line by line, with a reason on every line.
• Store credit as the refund when that is your policy — a customer-bound instrument minted on the spot.
• A manager's approval, asked for on the spot, when a return or a discount needs one.
• Stock back on the shelf, held for inspection, marked damaged or written off, as each unit's disposition says.

The drawer and the shift

• Till sessions: open → suspended → counting → closed, by a named person on a paired device.
• Cash drawer entries for paid-ins, paid-outs, drops and pickups, each with a reason; a no-sale opens the drawer with a reason too.
• A closing count per currency, with the over or short recorded on the session.
• The Z report for any till session — every drawer entry and the net — readable later by anyone with the right role.
• An abandoned session is visible, never lost — it can be forced closed.

People at the counter

• Add the customer's name, email and phone to the sale in seconds.
• Loyalty points: look the member up by email, attach them, redeem points on the spot.
• The cashier signs in with the office email and password; the register belongs to one organisation.
• The cashier's training standing as a badge on the register's home.

Working with the rest of the shop

• Pairing a device with a short code; suspending or removing it from the office.
• Online only, said up front: when the connection drops, the register says so and sells nothing until it is back — nothing is queued, nothing is lost.
• Every sale an event on the same permanent log the office and your assistant read.