Batch tracking has a vocabulary problem: FEFO gets confused with FIFO, best-before gets treated like use-by, and half the terms in a compliance request never appear on a warehouse floor. This glossary defines the 40 terms sellers of dated, lot-tracked products actually encounter — grouped by identification, dates, allocation, compliance, warehouse operations, and costing — each in plain language you can act on.
Identification & Coding
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Batch / lot | A quantity of product made or received together under uniform conditions and tracked as a single unit. In e-commerce and most regulations the two words are interchangeable. |
| Lot number | The identifier assigned to a batch, printed on packaging and recorded at every movement so the batch can be found again. It is the thread that connects receipts, orders, and recalls. |
| Traceability lot code | The lot identifier that follows a food through the supply chain under FSMA 204, linking the required data elements at each tracking event. It must stay with the product unless the food is transformed. |
| SKU vs. lot | A SKU identifies a product; a lot identifies one specific production run of that product. One SKU normally holds several lots at once, each with its own dates. |
| Serial vs. lot tracking | Serial tracking gives every individual unit its own unique identifier; lot tracking groups units under a shared batch identifier. Serials suit high-value durable goods, lots suit consumables sold in volume. |
| GTIN | Global Trade Item Number — the standardized product identifier encoded in UPC and EAN barcodes. It identifies the product, not the batch, so it complements rather than replaces a lot number. |
| Supplier lot | The lot number your supplier assigned to the goods you received. Recording it at receiving links your internal stock back one step in the supply chain. |
| Lot genealogy | The parent-child map connecting input lots to output lots when stock is repacked, combined, or transformed. It lets a problem in one input lot be traced into every product made from it. |
| Julian date | A date code expressing the day of the year as a number — 032 means February 1. Common in food lot codes as a compact way to embed the production date. |
Dates & Shelf Life
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Best-before date | A quality date: the product may lose flavor, texture, or potency after it, but is not automatically unsafe. Most shelf-stable foods carry this type of date. |
| Use-by date | A safety date: the product should not be consumed or used after it. Applied to perishable goods where deterioration can create a health risk. |
| Expiry date | The general term for the date after which a product should no longer be sold or used. For regulated goods such as medicines and supplements it is a hard stop, not a suggestion. |
| Sell-by date | A stock-rotation date aimed at the retailer, indicating when the product should leave the shelf. It is not a consumer safety cutoff. |
| Shelf life | The period a product remains safe and salable, counted from production or receipt. It drives every downstream decision from purchase quantity to allocation order. |
| Period after opening (PAO) | How long a cosmetic product stays usable once opened, shown as an open-jar symbol with a number of months (e.g., 12M). It runs independently of any printed expiry date. |
| Short-dated stock | Stock approaching its date faster than it is selling — often discounted or prioritized to move before it becomes a write-off. Forecasting expiry risk is how sellers catch it early. |
THE DATE-LABEL CONFUSION COSTS REAL MONEY
Treating best-before like use-by leads to discarding stock that was still salable; treating use-by like best-before is a safety and liability problem. Our guide to best-before vs. use-by vs. expiry dates covers which label means what, and where.
Allocation & Rotation
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| FEFO | First-expired-first-out: allocating the earliest-expiring in-date stock to each order, regardless of when it arrived. The standard rotation rule for dated goods — see how FEFO allocation works. |
| FIFO | First-in-first-out: allocating the earliest-received stock first. A reasonable proxy for FEFO only when receipt order matches expiry order — which top-ups and mixed supplier dates routinely break. |
| Allocation | Reserving specific stock — down to the batch — against an order before it is picked, so two orders cannot claim the same units and each shipment’s lot is known in advance. |
| Safety stock | A buffer quantity held above expected demand to absorb supply delays and demand spikes. For dated goods it trades stockout risk against expiry risk. |
| Expiry buffer | The minimum remaining shelf life stock must have to be allocated or shipped — for example, never ship anything with fewer than 30 days left. It protects customers from receiving nearly expired goods. |
Compliance & Recalls
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Mock recall | A timed exercise simulating a real recall: pick a shipped lot and measure how quickly you can account for every unit and every customer who received it. Regulators and retail buyers increasingly expect these on a schedule. |
| Traceback | Tracing a product backward from a downstream point — a customer complaint, a retail shelf — to its source lot and supplier, to find where a problem originated. |
| Trace-forward | Tracing a suspect lot forward to every location and customer that received it — the core of a recall. A recall export is this list produced on demand. |
| Key Data Element (KDE) | A specific piece of information — lot code, quantity, location, date — that FSMA 204 requires to be recorded for each critical tracking event. |
| Critical Tracking Event (CTE) | A supply-chain event where FSMA 204 requires records: receiving, transformation, and shipping are the ones most e-commerce sellers have. |
| Food Traceability List | The FDA’s list of foods subject to the FSMA 204 traceability rule, covering categories where outbreaks concentrate — leafy greens, soft cheeses, fresh-cut produce, certain seafood, and more. |
| Certificate of analysis (COA) | A supplier document reporting lab test results for a specific lot — identity, purity, contaminants. Filed per lot, it is the first document requested in a quality dispute. |
| Plant passport | An EU label required for the commercial movement of most plants and some seeds, carrying a traceability code that links the plant back to its registered operator. |
| Digital Product Passport (DPP) | A structured electronic record of a product’s origin, composition, and lifecycle data, being phased in under EU sustainability rules starting with batteries and textiles. |
| One-step-back, one-step-forward | The baseline traceability principle: for every lot, know your immediate supplier and your immediate customer. Most food-law traceability, including EU General Food Law, builds on it. |
Terms are the easy part — records are the work
TraceLot keeps lots, dates, allocations, and ledgers automatically as you fulfill through Veeqo or Shopify, so the vocabulary above describes things your system already does.
Browse the TraceLot docsWarehouse Operations
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Quarantine | Holding stock unavailable for sale pending inspection, test results, or a quality decision. Quarantined lots stay on hand but cannot be allocated to orders. |
| Batch ledger | The chronological record of every event in a lot’s life — receipt, each order deduction, corrections, transfers, disposal. It is the evidence base behind audit-ready records. |
| Mass balance | A reconciliation check that a lot’s inputs equal its outputs: received quantity should equal shipped plus written-off plus on-hand. A gap means missing records or missing stock. |
| Cycle count | Counting a rotating subset of stock on a regular schedule instead of one disruptive annual stocktake, so discrepancies are found and fixed continuously. |
Costing
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Landed cost | The full cost of getting stock onto your shelf: the purchase price plus freight, duty, insurance, and handling. Valuing inventory at purchase price alone understates what it really cost. |
| Weighted average cost (WAC) | The blended unit cost across receipts at different prices: total cost of all receipts divided by total units. It reprices whenever a new receipt arrives at a different cost. |
| Cost of goods sold (COGS) | The cost of the inventory actually sold in a period, matched against that period’s revenue to compute gross margin. Stock that expired unsold belongs in a separate line, not here. |
| Write-off | Removing lost stock — expired, damaged, unsellable — from the books: the inventory asset goes down and an expense is recognized, supported by a quantity, a cost, and a date. |
| Inventory valuation | The monetary value of on-hand stock as of a chosen date: receipts minus outflows to that date, priced — typically at weighted average cost. It is the closing-stock figure on the balance sheet. |
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