Glossary
The words Fikacare uses on screen, and what each one means.
3 min read
Alone — This machine has never reached any other. It works; it just knows only what has been done on it.
Amend — Writing a new entry that corrects an earlier one. Both stay visible. Nothing is edited in place.
Banner — The coloured strip saying how current the screen is. See Reading the banner.
Block — A range of numbers reserved for one machine, so it can issue receipts or tickets while offline without colliding with another machine.
Capability — What a machine is set up for: Reception, Consulting, Laboratory, Pharmacy, Finance, Administration. Decides which records it holds and which modules it runs.
Cash session — One person's turn at the till, from opening with a float to closing with a count.
Charge — Work billed to a patient, at a price copied from the tariff when it was raised.
Deposit — Money held against work not yet done. Not revenue until the work is charged.
Drill down — Opening a figure to see the records it is the sum of. Every figure in Fikacare does this.
Float — The cash you start a session with.
Gap — A receipt number a machine reserved and never used. Worth chasing. See Receipt continuity.
Hub — The machine that stays on and holds everything; what the others sync to over your own network. A role, not special hardware.
Kobo — Amounts are held as whole kobo and shown in naira, so nothing drifts by rounding.
Lease — The permission a machine needs to decrypt the hospital's records. Without a valid one, nothing on the machine can be read. Retiring a machine means it never gets another.
Opening balance — What a patient owed before Fikacare arrived. Credited to their account, never counted as revenue.
Outbox — The queue of work a machine has recorded and not yet sent. Never emptied by giving up.
Peer — Another machine on the same network. Peers pass records along; they never decide anything.
Provisional receipt — A receipt without a real number. Should always be zero: every receipt gets a real number from a block, even offline.
Retired — A machine taken out of service. Cannot sync and cannot read the hospital's records.
Stale — Over an hour since this machine reached anything.
Station — Any machine that is not the hub.
Tariff schedule — A price list. Self-paying, and one per HMO or NHIA scheme.
Ticket — The number called in the waiting room, taken from a block when a visit is opened.
Time of record — The time the hub or cloud stamped on a record when it arrived. What reports and ordering use, rather than a machine's own clock.
Visit — One attendance at the hospital. Everything that happens that day hangs off it.
Void — Cancelling a receipt issued in error. The receipt stays, marked void, with a reason and an authoriser.