Vending in plain words: a glossary for everyone else
Planograms, MDB, filling proposals, uptime — the words vending people use without thinking, explained for everyone who doesn't. Search for the one you just heard.
In short
- Every industry has its own words. Vending has more than most.
- This glossary explains the ones you'll hear when people talk about connected machines — no jargon in the answers.
- Type a word in the box to find it, or browse by letter.
If you've just started working with vending machines — as a site manager, a new hire in the office or a business owner thinking about connecting your fleet — you've probably nodded along to a few words you weren't sure about. That's normal. Here they are, in plain English.
The vending glossary
Alert
A message that tells the right person something needs attention — a fault, an empty slot, a machine that went offline. It shows up on screen and, if you like, on your phone. A good alert goes to the one person who can act on it, not to everyone.
Cashless
Any way of paying that isn't coins or notes: a bank card, a phone or watch tapped on a reader, or scanning a QR code. Cashless payments also leave a time-stamped record, which is what makes them so useful for understanding a site.
Coin changer
The part of the machine that accepts coins, checks them and gives change. It's one of the most common things to jam — and a jammed changer can turn a machine into an expensive decoration without anyone noticing.
Filling proposal
A suggested list of what each machine needs, worked out from how it has been selling since the last visit. The driver brings what the machine is likely to need instead of loading the van "the usual way".
Fleet
All the machines a business runs, wherever they are. A small operator's fleet might be twenty machines in one town; a large one might be thousands across a country.
Label
A short name you stick on machines to sort them your own way — "Region North", "Pilot", "Night route", "Hospital". Labels make it easy to filter, compare and export a slice of the fleet.
Logbook
A machine's diary. Every fill, fault, door opening and repair, in order. When a machine misbehaves, the logbook tells you whether it's the first time or the fifth.
Machine group
A set of machines that a person is allowed to see. A driver's group might be their route; a regional manager's group might be their region. It keeps everyone's screen focused on the machines that are theirs.
MDB
Short for "multi-drop bus" — a long-standing standard way for the parts inside a vending machine to talk to each other: the machine itself, the coin changer, the card reader and so on. Because most machines speak it, a connected module can listen in and report what's happening.
Offline
A machine that has stopped reporting — its connection dropped, or it lost power. An offline machine might be selling perfectly well, or not at all. Either way, you want to know.
Pick list
The list of products to take from the van for one particular machine, right before the visit. It's the filling proposal turned into something a driver can tick off.
Planogram
The plan of which product goes in which slot, at which price. In a shop it's the shelf layout; in a machine it's the map of the spirals. When the planogram on paper and the one in the machine drift apart, sales reports stop making sense.
QR payment
Paying by pointing a phone camera at a code on the machine's screen. A checkout opens on the phone, the shopper pays their usual way, and the machine vends. No app needed.
Slot (or lane)
One position in the machine that holds one product, usually a spiral or a column. "Slot 14 is empty" means the people who wanted whatever lives in slot 14 are out of luck.
Stockout
When a product runs out in a machine. A stockout of a bestseller is one of the quietest and most expensive problems in vending: the machine looks fine, but its most popular choice can't be bought.
Sub-client
A customer of a customer. A distributor might run machines on behalf of several businesses; each of those is a sub-client, with its own machines, people and figures, all looked after from the distributor's account.
Telemetry
Measuring things from a distance. For vending, it means the machine reports what it sells, how it's doing and when something goes wrong — without anyone standing next to it.
Terminal
The card reader fitted to a machine. It keeps its own record of every payment, which can be lined up with the machine's sales and with the money that reaches your account.
Tour
A planned trip that visits several machines in one go, for refilling or service. A tour planned from live data visits the machines that need it, in a sensible order, and skips the ones that don't.
Uptime
The share of time a machine was working and able to sell. A machine with 98% uptime in a month was out of action for about half a day. It's one of the simplest ways to compare sites and service quality.
VMC
The "vending machine controller" — the machine's own brain, which runs the spirals, the display and the buttons. It's the part that knows what was sold from which slot.
No word matches that yet. Try a shorter search — or ask us, and we'll add it.
Why the words matter
Most of these terms describe something simple. They only sound complicated because the people who use them every day stopped noticing. But a shared vocabulary makes a real difference when a business starts connecting its machines: the driver, the technician, the office and the customer can all talk about the same thing.
In your language, too. CleaVend's screens speak English, German and Italian, and use the same plain names you've just read — so what the driver sees on their phone is what the office sees on screen.
Three words worth remembering
If you only take away three, make them these:
- Stockout — because an empty bestseller costs more than most breakdowns.
- Uptime — because it's the simplest honest measure of how well a fleet is run.
- Filling proposal — because it's where guessing ends and planning starts.
Heard a word we've missed? Tell us. A glossary is only useful if it has the word you just heard in a meeting.