Glossary & terms
access point
A non unique alphanumeric reference given to identify the usages that will guide it toward the subscription for rating. To be noted, several subscription can use the same Access Point (AP), and they can use validity period for routing events toward subscription.
See Access point
accounting code
A unique alphanumeric reference given to a specific revenue or customer account to facilitate the reconciliation of transactions across various systems such as subscription management and billing, CRM, and accounting.
See Accounting codes
accounting period
A period of time in a business during which financial transactions are collected and evaluated. Revenues and expenses are recognized per accounting period. Some customers use calendar months, some use a rotating cycle of 4-4-5 week periods, and so on.
accounting period lockdown
The time when no one can add or update financial transactions in a particular accounting period. After you close the books or the accounting period, then the accounting period is locked.
activation fee
A one-time fee for initiation of service.
SeeOne Shot Charge Application
Article
An article (full name: Accounting Article) is the billing counterpart of the product from the catalog. Article is the link between rating and invoicing and accounting,it mainly holds the following information on : Tax,Accounting codeand Invoice sub category
See Article
API
An application programming interface (API) is a set of routines, data structures, object classes, and protocols provided by libraries and operating system services to support application development.
See API quick start
billing account - BA
The billed customer : This is the customer of the provider who receives the invoices produced. In many cases, the billed customer will be the customer of the provider, but there are cases in B2B where this correspondence does not exist. The customer is a company divided into Business Units with a separate budget for each. Each BU will wish to issue specific invoices, on the other hand, the customer and the paying customer will indeed be the global enterprise;
See Billing account
billing in advance
Charges for services provided at a later date.
billing in arrears
Charges for services delivered in the previous billing period.
bill run - BR
Automated means of generating one or more invoices based on a number of billing pre-conditions, such as a specific date range of charges, a subset or entire group of customers, etc.
bundle
A bundle is a grouping of mandatory Products within an Offer that will have a “bundle” price. The bundle price will include discounts that may or may not require specific discount accounting management.
C-CA-BA-UA-SUB-AP
This is the full hierarchy of Opencell through Customer (C), Customer Account (CA), Billing Account (BA), User Account (UA), Subscription (SUB), Access Point (AP). See other entries for each meaning.
charges
Wallets accumulate charges of different natures as per the description.
chart of accounts
A chart of accounts is the list of accounts, such as Cash and Accounts Receivable, that form the basis of standard accounting practice. In a typical accounting system, journal entries (transaction records) are made in a general ledger (accounting database) to track income, expenses, and any changes to your assets and liability balances. Each journal entry includes an amount of money and two accounts that are affected by the transaction. For instance, when a customer pays an invoice, a journal entry is created to show that a specified dollar amount was moved from Accounts Receivable to Cash.
churn
A measure of customer attrition, calculated as the number of customers who discontinue service during a specified time period, divided by the total number of customers at the start of that period. Churn is an operational metric that gauges the overall health of a subscription business. Churn is measured in units or dollars.
close rate
Sales terminology for the percent of sales prospects that result in actual paying business.
cloud computing
Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtual resources are provided as a service over the internet. This is in contrast, for instance, to maintaining large computing or data-storage resources at your own site, along with the attendant responsibility for staffing, backups, etc.
See Kubernetes
contract effective date
The date from which contract terms take effect. This date also can determine when certain charges can be billed to the customer, and often coincides with the start of the subscription term.
conversion rate
The percentage of users whose status changes - e.g., from a website visitor, to a known lead, to a free trial user, and finally to a paid subscriber. Subscription businesses depend upon known conversion rates to monitor the health of the business and to predict future pipeline and revenue.
CPQ
CPQ Stands for Configure, Price, Quote.
customer - C
The customer : This is the provider's customer which will be managed in Opencell. This customer may be an individual, a company. As already indicated above, it is a business object specific to the provider vision which may be different from the concept of Customer in Opencell.
customer account - CA
The paying customer : This is the provider's customer who pays the invoices. In many cases, the paying customer is the customer of the provider especially in B2C, on the other hand in B2B, we can have a customer company which is invoiced but the payer is another entity of the group. Example: a large group which has divided its commercial activity into several units but which centralizes all the administration and payment part at the level of the parent company. As for the customer, the concept of the paying customer can be different from the concept of Customer Account of Opencell ;
See Customer account
downgrade
A downgrade is a change order or amendment to an existing contract or subscription in which a customer chooses a lower service level. A downgrade can be a less expensive service offering, or a smaller quantity or users or usage levels. Depending on business rules, this change can result in a prorated credit of the original service or a penalty fee associated with the change.
due upon receipt
Payment term in which payment is due immediately upon receipt of the invoice.
electronic payment
Any non-paper based form of payment, such as ACH, wire transfer, credit or debit card, PayPal.
evergreen
A subscription that remains active until the subscriber cancels.
functional currency
A home currency refers to the currency used by the tenant for financial reporting. A tenant has only one home currency.
general ledger account
The primary accounting record for a business. This account uses double-entry bookkeeping, which divides the account between debits and credits, and includes other accounts for specific types of transactions.
See General ledger
Job
Jobs are computerized batch processing tasks that perform most of the automated and recurrent work of the system. This allows mass processing and distributed computing to manage high volume.
See Job list
journal entry
A journal entry report provides journal entries in a format that can be imported into your accounting system to update the summary journal entries for current and future accounting periods.
MRR (monthly recurring revenue)
Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) calculates subscription recurring fees normalized to a monthly value.
offers
Offers are a list of Products that can be activated at subscription. It represents the bundle of Products that is closest to the commercial package. Before V11, Offers were called Service.
order-to-cash
The process in which a customer places an order, service is provided, an invoice is generated, and payment is collected. Order-to-cash is a recurring, ongoing process in a subscription business.
overage
Usage charges incurred when service levels included in the rate plan are exceeded.
payment
A payment is the money that customers send to pay for invoices related to their subscriptions.
price plans
Price plans are entity lookups performed by the rating engine to determine the price of a charge that are attached to the seller and to a given nature of charge. Once a charge is identified to be applied (whether it is recurring or event-based), the rating engine will determine the price plan and thus the price depending on the properties of the charge, the age of the subscription, the event, the account and the subscription and other criteria. There is a priority attached to the price plans in case multiple price plans are applicable for a charge.
See Price Plan
product (post V11 - model V2)
Products group charges and are often aligned to actual services such as license, storage, voice etc. but not exclusively.
See Product
provider
Service provider or Provider : In our case it is the company using Opencell. It is therefore the client of Opencell. It provides a service to its customers and needs to value this service to invoice them. It's why he is using Opencell.
See Provider
quote-to-cash
The end-to-end business process of creating a quote for a prospect or customer's order management, invoicing, and cash receipt.
rated transaction - RT
A rated transaction (RT) is a Wallet Operation that has been rated. They will remain Open till it has been included into a Bill Run and then an Invoice.
refund
A refund returns money to a customer - as opposed to a credit, which creates a customer credit balance that may be applied to reduce the amount owed to you. For instance, refunds are used when a customer cancels service and is no longer your customer. Refunds can also represent processed payments that are reversed, such as a chargeback or a direct debit payment reversal.
See Credit note / Invoice adjustment
renewal rate
The percentage of subscribers scheduled to expire during a particular cycle who renew their subscriptions. Renewal rate is a subscription operational metric that reflects overall customer satisfaction. Can be measured on a unit or dollar value basis.
revenue event
A Revenue Event represents a change to a revenue schedule, such as creating the initial schedule, canceling an invoice, or recognizing an undistributed amount.
revenue item
A Revenue Item represents the amount of revenue distributed into an accounting period.
revenue recognition
Revenue Recognition determines when revenue can be recognized for a service. Revenue recognition follows the basic principle that revenue can be recognized when a service has been provided and when you are likely to receive payment for that service.
revenue recognition rule
A Revenue Recognition Rule governs the automated creation and change of revenue schedules on a charge.
revenue schedule
A Revenue Schedule is a distribution of revenue amounts over a number of accounting periods–representing how revenue should be recognized over time. A revenue schedule is tied to a single charge.
revenue schedule amount
A Revenue Schedule Amount is the sum of all amounts placed into accounting periods – including the “open-ended” accounting period.
sandbox environment
A sandbox is a separate technical environment where customers or prospects can test software or services with a subset of data without disruption to their production environments.
services (prior V11 - Model 1)
Services group charges and are often aligned to actual services such as license, storage, voice etc. but not exclusively.
setup fee
Sometimes called activation fees, set-up fees are a one time charge levied to cover costs associated with getting a customer up and running on a service.
shopping cart
A shopping cart is a software application that acts as a virtual container to hold products that your customers search for and order. For many subscription businesses, adding an item to the shopping cart is typically referred to as the “Subscribe Now” or “Order Now” processes where customer profile and payment information is collected to provide the service and start billing.
service order manager (SOM)
A service order manager is a software that will manage the orchestration and translation from a commercial order into billing and service (provisionning) orders.
subscription charge
A Subscription charge represents a contract to provide a service between a business and its customer.
tiered pricing
A common subscription and usage charge model where pricing changes are based on the incremental number of units that are purchased. For example, 1-5 users are charged full price and 5-10 users receive discounted pricing. A customer purchases 7 units. Units 6 and 7 are discounted, and the first 5 units are charged at the full price.
trial balance
Verifies that all the general ledger accounts balance. All of the debit columns and the credit columns must be equal to ensure accurate reporting and revenue recognition.
undistributed revenue
Undistributed Revenue occurs when the accounting period in which to recognize revenue cannot be determined. This undistributed amount is held in an open-ended accounting period until it can be distributed.
upgrade
A change order or amendment to an existing contract subscription in which a customer chooses a higher service level, such as a more expensive service offering, or a larger quantity of users.
usage charge
Charge associated with actual consumption of a given product or service. This is measured in terms of time on a site, gigabytes of data, number of reports generated, miles driven, or any other unit of measure.
These are the consumption informations of the provider's clients. They can come from different systems and be of different natures. They can correspond to events (opening, closing of a service for example) or to a quantified consumption of a service.
usage pricing
Pricing a service or item based on its consumption or usage rather than a flat rate for a given service or period of time.
user account
The consumer : This is the consumer of the services offered by the provider. A customer can have one or more consumers. The notion of consumer seen by the provider may be different from the User Account notion in Opencell . For example in B2C, the customer is also the consumer. The two concepts are in this case confused for the provider;
See User Account
volume pricing
A common subscription and usage charge model in which pricing changes based on the total number of units that are purchased. For example, if a customer has 5 or fewer users, then the customer is charged full price. If the customer has 10 or fewer users, then the customer is charged a discounted price. Therefore, if a customer purchases 7 units, then the customer pays the discounted price on all 7 units.
wallets - wallet operation - WO
A wallet Operation is a charge that has been triggered but not yet rated. When rated it will become a Rated Transaction (RT).
Wallets can only be monetary and are used to accumulate the value of the rated transactions. Each type of charge is necessarily mapped to a wallet (prepaid or postpaid) at the level of the service. A customer has a postpaid wallet and potentially multiple prepaid wallets. A prepaid wallet can be kept empty, so the charge can be deducted from other wallets in a cascading mode.
See Wallet operations & rerating
web store aka subscription tunnel
A web store or online store is a website where prospects and customers can browse, select, and purchase products or services.