Plain-English definitions for every POS term.

They are a quick way to signal how a term is used, and it is worth being honest about what they are and are not. A tag such as “standard” means the word is general industry vocabulary — something you would hear across most point-of-sale or restaurant-technology products, not specific to us. “Tech” flags a more technical or infrastructure term, the kind that tends to matter to whoever integrates or administers the system rather than to someone taking orders. “Vertex specific” means we are describing how the term is used inside Vertex in particular — a feature name, a screen, or a piece of our own terminology — which may differ from how another vendor uses the same word, so it is worth checking the context before assuming it carries across. The important caveat: these labels are editorial. Our team assigns them to help you read the glossary, and they are our judgement about how a term is generally used. They are not designations issued by a standards body, a certification, or any formal authority, and you should not cite them as though a term is officially “standard” because we tagged it that way. If a label looks wrong to you, it may well be, and we would rather hear about it than have you rely on it.

No, and it matters that we are clear about that. These are plain-English explanations written to help operators understand terms quickly, not authoritative, legal, or standards-body definitions. We have tried to keep them accurate and current, but a glossary entry is a summary written for readability, and summarising always means leaving something out. For a lot of everyday terms that is completely fine — you mainly want to know roughly what a word means and why it comes up. But some terms carry real weight, particularly anything touching compliance, security, or money: things like PCI, chargebacks, tokenisation, refunds, tax handling, and the various data-protection terms. For those, our definition is a starting point to orient you, not a source you should act on. The formal meaning is set by the relevant authority — the card networks and the PCI Security Standards Council for payment-security terms, your acquirer or payment processor for how chargebacks and disputes actually work for you, and your own tax or legal adviser for anything with a regulatory edge. Where a term has that kind of weight, read our entry to get your bearings and then go to the body that actually owns the definition before you rely on it. Nothing here is legal, financial, or compliance advice.

The glossary is updated over time rather than on a fixed schedule. Terminology in this industry moves — new payment methods appear, features get renamed, and words that meant one thing a few years ago now mean something narrower or broader — so we revise entries as things change and add new ones as they become worth explaining. That also means any particular entry reflects our understanding at the time it was written, and if you spot something that has drifted out of date, telling us is genuinely useful. And yes, please suggest terms. If you searched for a word and did not find it, or found an explanation that did not quite land, that is exactly the feedback that makes this page better for the next person. The quickest route is the Help Center at /help, where you can send us the term you were looking for and, if it helps, the context you saw it in. If you would rather talk to someone directly, or your question is really about your own account rather than the vocabulary, reach out through /contact instead. Either way it reaches us — there is no wrong door — and concrete suggestions with a bit of context are the ones we can act on fastest.

A glossary entry is deliberately short — enough to tell you what a term means, not enough to tell you how a feature works end to end — so when a definition names something Vertex actually does, the next step is the page built for that feature. The feature and solutions pages go into what a capability does, who it is for, how it fits a real workflow, and where the practical limits sit, which is the detail a one-paragraph definition cannot carry. If you are trying to work out whether something applies to your kind of operation, those pages are the right place to look, and they will be more current and more specific than a glossary line. For the hands-on side — how to turn a feature on, configure it, and use it day to day — the documentation at /documentation is where the step-by-step material lives, and it is kept closer to the actual product than a reference page can be. And if a definition leaves you with a question that is really about your own setup or your plan rather than the meaning of a word, that is a conversation for our team through /contact or the Help Center at /help, where someone can answer against what you actually have rather than in the general terms a glossary has to use.