Terms of Stax Bill

The actual state of a specific subscription under the customer governing whether or not the subscription is considered by the automatic recurring billing process.

When subscriptions are first created on a customer they are in Draft status. Draft subscriptions can be edited and configured and only impact the draft invoice they are associated with.

When a customer is activated then all subscriptions under that customer also become Active. Active subscriptions cycle through the automated recurring billing run. Modifications made to active subscriptions can have an immediate financial impact depending on the charge timing settings specified.

Subscriptions that are scheduled to become active in a future period are placed in provisioning status and have a release date scheduled.

Subscriptions that reach a specified expiry date will be moved to this status and are no longer processed through the recurring billing run.

If a subscription is migrated to another subscription then the original source subscription will be set to the migrated status in order to maintain a historical trail.

A customer entity field that identifies whether or not the customer is part of the active billing processing base. All customers will always be in one of the service status states.

This is the service status used when Customers are first created in the Stax Bill system. Customers in Draft service status can accept settings, subscriptions and payment methods but do not automatically process through the recurring billing run.

This is the service status used when Customers begin to automatically process through the billing run. Once activated, customers cannot be put back into a Draft Status.

This is the service status used when a customer is manually set to be taken out of the recurring billing run manually. Customers in a hold service status do not process automatically through the system for new charges or cash collections.

This is the service status used when the Stax Bill system automatically flags the customer to be removed from the automated billing run. The Stax Bill system will set customers to suspended status if they are in Poor standing for longer than their Grace Period. When customers are suspended all of their subscriptions are also suspended.

This is the service status used when a customer is officially cancelled. Cancelling a customer cancels all subscriptions under that customer. MRR is recorded as churned when a customer becomes cancelled.

A custom set of permissions to control the screens that users can access in the Stax Bill Interface.

Not to be confused with Subscription Recharge. Renewal (within the context of Stax Bill) refers to the action taken to extend the life of an Expiring Subscription.

Within the context of Stax Bill subscriptions, a recharge date refers to the day on which a subscription bills.

Catalog entity under an account that represents a chargeable line item. Products have display names and code values that govern how they are shown on invoices and reports.

One-time charge products are products that do not recur even when they are inside of plans. They are usually used to provide one-time administrative setup fees to customers. These types of products can be priced outside of a plan and can be made available for one-time purchases. One-time charge products can still be given Revenue Recognition Schedules if desired.

Physical Goods products are products that do not recur even when they are inside of plans. They can be priced and made available for purchase. Physical good products cannot have a revenue recognition schedule. They are always fully earned at the time that they are charged for.

Recurring products must be inserted into plans in order to be charged. They are used to fill out all of the line items that recur on a subscription. Recurring Products can only be priced within the context of the plan frequency they are added to.

Plan Family is the major configuration starting point for getting started with migration in Stax Bill. It is a catalog plan grouping system that allows users to set up relationships between plans and frequencies in that family.

Customer entity field that represents the sum total of all non-posted invoices on the customer.

Customer sub-entity that holds a collection of notes that billing agents can place on the customer to provide additional billing instructions if required. Notes identify who creates them and when they are created.

MRR is an acronym for Monthly Recurring Revenue, or very simply a measure of your predictable revenue stream. A primary purpose of MRR is to permit performance reporting across dissimilar subscriptions terms. MRR is frequently used in a number of critical subscription performance reports Momentum, Customer Lifetime Value (uses MRR in the CLV computations) and MRR Cohort.

A collection of charges that consider Discounts and taxes to come up with a total amount due on a specific day. Invoices are outputted by the Stax Bill system as part of the automatic billing run.

Invoices that are in the Stax Bill system in a new state and have not yet been committed.

Pending Draft Invoices are created in the Stax Bill system whenever subscriptions are first created on customers but still require configuration.

Ready draft invoices are invoices that would have become Posted Invoices if the Auto-Post setting had been set to ON for the customer. Ready draft invoices can still be manually edited and have not yet moved financial ledgers.

Projected invoices show the expected next invoice that will output in the future when the next billing date is reached.

Posted invoices have been committed to the customer and have actually moved ledger records. Once an invoice is posted it must have payment/credit notes applied to it in order to adjust its status.

The possible types of payment status:

• Due – Invoice has been generated and posted but is not yet due
• Overdue – Invoice is past its due date and has an outstanding balance
• Paid – Invoice has no outstanding balance, typically because it has been paid
• Written Off - Invoice has been manually written off in full as an uncollectible expense. Partial write-offs will not result in this status.
• Disputed – Invoice is being disputed. Manually set and removed via the UI. Any disputed invoices are removed from the AR Aging Report.
• Void - All charges have been reversed on this invoice, making a balance due of $0. (Note that partial write-offs that contribute to the balance being $0 will be included in this status.)

A General Ledger Code, or GL Code, is a set of numerals that can be applied to products that will appear in various accounting data sets and reports throughout Stax Bill.

This allows users to more easily distill information from some of the data sets that come out of Stax Bill. Either through the existing reporting around GL codes in Stax Bill (Sales, Revenue, MRR) or through the export and pivot/analysis of data (Reconciliation Report).

Customer entity field automatically assigned by the Stax Bill system for all customers. Guaranteed to be unique.

EOP (End of Period) charge, applies to charge timing on a subscription or plan product. End of Period charges are typically charges where it is uncertain the total charge until the end of the period.

The Stax Bill system, at its core, manages the creation and management of billing entities which are called Customers.

Customers act as an entity that identifies who the buyer is, what they are subscribed to and how they pay for their services on a recurring basis.

Customers may be referred to internally in a variety of different ways by different organizations. Common terminology includes “Member”, “User”, “Subscriber”, “Client”, “Account”. Regardless of how they are referred to by an organization, it is important to isolate the individual billing entity for your needs. A customer in the Stax Bill system represents the entity that will receive billing communications and is responsible for paying for services provided.

A collection of tombstone data like First and Last Name, Company name, internal unique identifiers as well as Address and email information.

A collection of settings identifying how to maintain the recurring billing life cycle on the customer entity. Terms, auto-collection and dunning management settings

Settings control what the customer is re-charged for on a recurring basis. Pricing, frequency, quantities, discounts, uplifts can be managed and configured for any customer.

Secure storage of the customer’s payment method information for automated recurring billing.

All historical transactions (Charges, Payments, etc..) are maintained on customer entities. Invoices, statements, and ledgers provide valuable paper trails of customer lifecycles over time.

A customer entity field which holds a running total of how much revenue has been earned on the customer for its entire lifetime. This field opens up as the negative value of the customer acquisition cost and goes up by the net amount of revenue earned on the customer.

The customer entity field is used to hold the account’s code to identify their customer. Stax Bill encourages accounts to maintain a unique value in this field, however, uniqueness is not mandatory. This field can be re-named by the account via the Display Settings to improve clarity.

A ledger impacted by payments and refunds.

Application Programming Interface key is a unique code that is passed into an API. It is used to identify the application or user making the API call. It tracks and controls who and what is using the API.