This Glossary is a quick review guide to familiarize users with business and technology terms associated with Chargebee.
| Terminology | Description |
|---|---|
| Account Hierarchy | Account hierarchy allows you to create an organizational structure to establish a parent-child relationship among your customers in Chargebee. |
| Addon | Addon defines a service or item that's being offered in addition to the plan on a recurring or non-recurring basis. |
| Coupon | A coupon defines the discount percentage or amount being applied, and the period up to which it will be applied on a subscription. |
| Coupon Code | Coupon codes are promo codes that are required for running campaigns. |
| Coupon Set | Coupon codes are collectively referred to as coupon sets. All the coupon codes in a coupon set will have the same behavior as the main coupon they're linked to. |
| Credit Note | CA credit note is a document sent by the merchant to the customer, notifying that a credit has been provided to their account. |
| Customer | Customer is a record that contains all the essential information about your customer, such as basic contact details, billing information, payment information and so on. |
| Invoice | An Invoice is a document issued by the business to its customer, detailing out the services and/or products sold to them. |
| Plan | A plan defines a set of features for your product/service, the frequency of billing and amount to be charged for it on a recurring basis. |
| Product Catalog | This is where you define your product or service offerings in the Chargebee site. Plans, addons, coupons, and coupon sets form the product catalog. |
| Quote | Quote in Chargebee is a document used to inform a potential buyer the cost of goods or services before they commit to the purchase. |
| Subscription | A subscription is used for modeling the bundle of items subscribed to by a customer. |
| Terminology | Description |
|---|---|
| 3D Secure | 3-D Secure (3DS) is an additional authentication protocol implemented by the Card networks to secure online card transactions. |
| Automated Clearing House (ACH) | a type of electronic funds transfer network used in the United States. ACH provides inter-bank clearing of credit and debit transactions. |
| Bank Based Payments | Chargebee allows you to connect with popular bank based payment methods across the globe, these include iDEAL, Sofort, and Bancontact. |
| Challenge Flow | A payment workflow wherein the Bank will require the customer to provide additional security responses via 3DS 2.0 or 3DS 1.0 based on the issuing banks availability in order to complete a transaction. |
| Chargeback | A Chargeback is a dispute raised for a payment made by the customer where the customer disputes the transaction with the bank directly. |
| Chargebee Test Gateway | Chargebee Test Gateway allows you to visualize scenarios such as payment success, payment failure due to invalid card details or insufficient funds, smart routing etc. This is a test gateway and is available only in the Test Site |
| Criminal Fraud | A Criminal Fraud refers to unauthorized transactions on the card made by fraudsters or hackers. |
| Digital Wallets | Digital wallets are virtual financial accounts that allow users to store funds, make transactions, and track payments. |
| Direct Debit | Direct Debit payments are initiated by the merchant and made directly from a customer's bank account. |
| Dunning | Dunning ensures the invoices of failed payments get into a retry(charge retry) and follow up(email notifications) cycle. Dunning is the prime payment recovery mechanism in Chargebee for 3DS payment failures due to authentication requirement. |
| Fallback flow | A failed payment that is bought to the notice of the customer to be bought online and reauthenticated. |
| Frictionless flow | A workflow wherein the Bank can authenticate the customer based on the background data provided such as device fingerprint or IP address. Then the customer is exempted from additional verification to complete the transaction. the customer and the transaction goes through a normal flow. |
| Friendly Fraud | Friendly fraud is the process of filing a chargeback directly without contacting the merchant for a refund. |
| Merchant Error | Merchant Error occurs when the customer's card is erroneously charged for a subscription or product that was already canceled. |
| Merchant Initiated Transaction (MIT) | These include most of the off-session(customer is away) payments such as renewals, one-time charges, subscription trial to active upgrades etc. |
| Offline Dunning | Dunning option for customers whose payments are collected manually, i.e., for subscription with Auto Collection turned OFF. |
| Payment Gateway | The virtual equivalent of a credit card machine, a payment gateway is your portal to accepting online payments (everything from card payments to direct debit payments to payments via online wallets). |
| Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) | This unique euro payment area establishes an integrated European market for payment instruments. |
| Smart Routing | Smart Routing is used to configure rules to help Chargebee pick the right gateway account when a customer adds their payment method. |
| Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) | Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) is a European Regulatory rule that will help reduce fraud and make online payments more secure. SCA is only required if you operate out of Europe |
| Transaction Descriptor | A customized description for transactions to help customers identify transactions on their card/bank statement. |
| Terminology | Description |
|---|---|
| Advanced Filter Options | All of Chargebee's tabs in the web interface are fully equipped with quick and advanced filter options that can be customized. |
| API Keys | API Keys are used to authenticate your application and control its access to the Chargebee API. |
| Chargebee Notifications | These are customizable roles that can be setup for users if the pre-configured templates do not match a merchant requirement. You can do this contacting Chargebee support |
| Custom Fields | Chargebee provides the option of creating custom fields for the Customer and Subscription objects. |
| Custom Roles | These are customizable roles that can be setup for users if the pre-configured templates do not match a merchant requirement. This can be achieved by contacting Chargebee support |
| Customers | End-users who have signed up with a merchant for services or products. |
| Enforce User Authentication Policy | Allows merchants to setup authentication protocols for their site and users. These include Two Factor Authentication and Single Sign-On. |
| Event | Any change that happens to the system is captured as an event. These include changes relating to customers, subscriptions, plans, addons and coupons. |
| File Attachment | Adding relevant information to a record is always bound to come in handy. You can attach new files to an entity's record, which will serve the purpose of having every related information in one place. |
| Mandatory Fields | Customer and subscription-related data that is collected and stored in Chargebee crucial to your business for various reasons. |
| Merchant | An entity that has signed up with Chargebee to manage its subscription business. customers who have signed up with a business. |
| Metadata | Metadata summarizes basic information about data. Metadata enriches raw data with information making it easier to discover, use and manage. |
| Multi Currency Pricing | Chargebee's Multicurrency feature provides you with the option of creating Plans in multiple currencies, thus allowing your customers to pay in their local currency. |
| Multi Decimal Support | The multi-decimal support feature helps you avoid compromising your price and unit values, and ensures more accurate billing. |
| Reason Codes | Chargebee comes with a set of reason codes that are enabled by default for selection while cancelling a subscription or creating credit notes. |
| Roles | A role allows a user particular functionality within your Chargebee site so that a user can perform a task or set of tasks. |
| Single Sign On (SSO) | SSO allows team members to sign on using their associated credentials. Chargebee supports authentication via SAML or Google. |
| Two Factor Authentication (2FA) | Two-factor authentication (2FA), sometimes referred to as two-step verification or dual-factor authentication, is a security process in which users provide two different authentication factors to verify themselves. |
| Users | Chargebee allows you to create or add individuals to your Chargebee site depending on your plan. |
| Webhook | Webhooks (or HTTP callbacks) can be used to notify your systems about events as they occur in your Chargebee instance. |
| Terminology | Description |
|---|---|
| Abandoned Cart | When the customer leaves a checkout page unattended for 30 minutes, or when they close the webpage and not return to it. |
| Custom Domain | Also known as white-labeling, it lets you have your website domain, instead of Chargebee's on the hosted pages' URLs. |
| Drop-in Script | This is the quickest way to start accepting payments. From within Chargebee's web interface you can generate the script needed for integrating both checkout and portal into your website. |
| Guest Checkout | enables you to allow your customers to complete their checkout without adding a payment method to their subscription. |
| Hosted Pages | A collective term for Chargebee checkout and portal. |
| Terminology | Description |
|---|---|
| Accounting Summary | The Account Summary report is a monthly report of your sales, discounts, bad debts, aging balance and reversals, that can be used for accounting purposes. |
| Activations | This dashboard displays the count of number of subscriptions that are "Active". This also includes subscriptions that are reactivated are also included. |
| AR Ageing | This report categorizes the AR invoices according to the time period for which an invoice is outstanding. Understanding the outstanding invoices better would help you improve collection efficiency. |
| Bulk Operations | Bulk Operations feature is used to move sizeable volumes of your subscription billing data into Chargebee. |
| Churn Rate | This is the percentage of subscriptions that are canceled in the reporting period. |
| Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue(CMRR) | Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue (CMRR) is similar to MRR except that it takes into account all the future pending changes for the month in consideration |
| Deferred Revenue | The Deferred Revenue report provides the pending revenue to be recognized each month, for the period selected. |
| Flexible MRR | By default, Chargebee computes the MRR of a subscription based on only the recurring charges such as recurring plans, addons, and coupons applied to the subscription. One time coupons and charges that are non-recurring are not included in the MRR calculation. |
| Metered billing | Metered billing or usage-based billing is a billing structure that helps charge users based on their monthly usage of the products/services |
| Migration | Moving data from your existing billing system to maintain and bill them in Chargebee. |
| Recovered Cart | Recovered Cart is a previously abandoned cart that is now available for checkout. |
| Reports | Reports allow you to view and analyze the statistics of your account and it gives you comprehensive details about your collections, billing, and transactions. |
| Revenue Recognition | Revenue recognition is an accounting methodology which helps determining the revenue to be recognized over the period of time the service is consumed. |
| Revenue Story | Revenue Story gives you a 360° business visibility on subscription analytics. It helps you identify the key performance indicators driving revenue, subscriptions, signups, activations, churn and a host of other metrics that you need to make effective decisions. |
| Sign-ups | This dashboard displays the count of total number of signups. |
| Terminology | Description |
|---|---|
| EU-GDPR | General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Data Protection Directive and raises the bar in personal data protection for EU individuals. |
| Consent Management | Chargebee's Consent Management feature gives you powerful ways to capture consent from your customers and manage collected consent information. |
| Personal Data Management | Personal Data Management helps you align Chargebee with your customer data retention policies. |
| Compliance Certificates | The certificates and reports detailing Chargebee's adherence to data security and regular audits are available for download in your Chargebee application. |
| Terminology | Description |
|---|---|
| Entitlements | Entitlements are the set of privileges that govern to what extent or how much an application user can access or utilize its features. |
| Features | Features in Chargebee are a representation of your product features for which you want to limit access. |
| Items | Items represent the products or services that you offer to your customers. |
| Switch Type Features | Features that are either Available or Not Available to a user. |
| Quantity Type Features | Features that are offered with pre-defined max and min numerical limits to users. |
| Range Type Features | Features that can be offered with numerical limits within a certain range. |
| Custom Type Features | Features and benefits that have various entitlement levels, but aren't numerical by nature. |
| Draft Feature | A feature that is still in development, and is not available publicly. |
| Custom Type Features | Features and benefits that have various entitlement levels, but aren't numerical by nature. |
| Archived Feature | Archived features are those which the user no longer wants to provide or plans on decommissioning. Archived features cannot be associated with any new items, but they will continue to be present on the existing ones. |
| Subscription Entitlements | Collection of effective entitlements for a subscription. A Subscription Entitlement consists of Entitlements which the subscription gets from the Item it has purchased and Entitlement overrides specific to the subscription. |
| Subscription Entitlement Override | When you add a feature at the subscription level and not at the item level. It allows you to override the feature entitlements granted at the item level and control to what extent a user can access or utilize these features. |
| Item Entitlement | Items represent the products or services you offer to your customers, and item entitlement represents the entitlement an item has towards a feature. |
| Limited Period Override / Feature Trial | Limited period override or Feature trial provides you an option to specify the duration up to which you want an entitlement to be active. |