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Last updated on Aug 28, 2026
Maxio Core and Advanced Billing grew up as separate applications, so the same billing concept sometimes carries a different name in each one, and a few names mean different things depending on which application you are in. Use this page as a translation table when you are moving between the two, or when a colleague uses a term you don't recognize.
The terms below are grouped by where they apply: those shared across the Maxio platform, those specific to Advanced Billing, and those specific to Maxio Core.
Dates are one place the two applications genuinely disagree rather than just using different words: see Understanding the One-Day End Date Difference between Advanced Billing and Maxio Core.
These terms exist in both applications. Where the meaning differs between them, the definition says so.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Customer | For Maxio Core, the customer represents both Maxio Core customers and their end customers. Advanced Billing refers to Customers as the end customer of our customers (referred to as Merchants). Additionally, Customer on the Maxio Core side requires company or organization level information; whereas the required field on Advanced Billing is first and last name. |
| Invoice | An invoice is the aggregation of all charges, taxes, and discounts due for payment available externally. |
| Invoice Line Item | The itemized list of all items on an invoice, which sum to the amount due less tax on the invoice. |
| Payment | A payment is used to reduce the amount a customer owes from a previously issued Invoice. These can be automatically collected based on the defined payment profile or applied manually based on check/cash/etc. received. |
These terms apply to Advanced Billing only. Most of them describe the product catalog and the subscription objects built on top of it.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Merchant | Merchant is internal Advanced Billing terminology for our direct customers (i.e. those with a subscription to Advanced Billing). The merchants would then sell subscriptions of products to their customers via their own Advanced Billing account. |
| Site | A site is a container for a merchant’s products, subscriptions, and customers. Each site has its own settings and configuration. In particular, each site defines its own subdomain, currency, and gateway settings. Any reporting that Advanced Billing performs is done at the Site level. |
| Subscription | Subscriptions are central to Advanced Billing. They tie your customers to your products and are responsible for billing and charging on your recurring intervals. The subscription defines the set of services a customer is using today and those which will be invoiced upon the next invoice date. |
| Proforma Invoice | Proforma invoices allow both you, the merchant, and the customer to see upcoming expected billing amounts. These are not payable invoices but instead a preview of what is expected to bill at the next renewal. |
| Prepayment | Prepayments are payments applied to a subscription that exceed any invoice due amounts. The prepayment amounts can then be applied to subsequent invoices. |
| Refund | Refunds can be processed via the system for certain gateways or recorded as external refunds when issued via cash, check, or other methods. In Advanced Billing, these refunds can be created in combination with a Credit Note (this would align with a Maxio Core Refund Receipt) or standalone (not available in Maxio Core). |
| Credit Note | A credit note is used to reduce the amount a customer owes and is categorized as five different subtypes: migration, component downgrade, void, refund, and general. |
| Service Credit | Service credits are a way to reduce the amount that a subscriber owes on an open invoice. They are created against a subscription and can be manually applied to invoices or will automatically be applied to the next invoice issued. Service credits are applied to invoices as credit notes, and credit notes reduce the invoice due amount, like a payment. |
| Product Catalog | Product catalog refers to the section of the Advanced Billing app that allows merchants to configure and maintain a full listing of all products, components, coupons, and offers, and related sign-up pages. |
| Product Family | Product families enable grouping for your products that can be considered different “feature levels” or “plans” of the same service or offering. |
| Product | A product, referred to some as a plan, is defined primarily by a recurring amount charged at a set interval for a limited or open-ended period. Products may also include set-up fees and trials. |
| Price Point | Product price points allow you to charge customers different amounts and at different frequencies for the same product. You can define multiple price points per product, and select a default price point that will be used in cases where a price point isn’t specified. |
| Component | Components allow you to introduce additional “line items” to your products that are often expressed as “add-ons”, upsold features, or pay-per-use items. These are defined at the product family level and are therefore available to all products within the family. There are six different component types: Quantity Based (One-Time), Quantity Based (Recurring), On/Off, Metered Usage, Prepaid Usage, and Events Based Billing. |
| Coupon | Discounts to be applied to a customer subscription can be defined as either a set amount or percentage. Additional configurations such as restricting the applicable product/component, stackability, compounding strategy, and recurring options are available. |
| Offer | Offers combine the essential product catalog building blocks (Products, Components, Coupons) into packages that are easier to bring to market and can be thought of as bundles. |
| Grouped Subscription | Advanced Billing’s subscription groups allow merchants to group together individual subscriptions so that they can be billed on one consolidated invoice. These consolidated invoices will be issued on the primary group member's billing schedule. |
| WhoPays | WhoPays is a feature that allows payment responsibility to be assigned to another customer in the same hierarchy (i.e. an ancestor may be the payer, but another unrelated customer may not be the payer). As such, this feature can only be used in conjunction with Customer Hierarchy. |
These terms apply to Maxio Core only. They center on the contract as the container that revenue recognition and finance reporting are calculated against.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Contract | A contract is an agreement of what has been purchased and will be delivered over the term of the contract. These serve as containers for key records like transactions and invoices and are the object around which deferred revenue and unbilled AR calculations are performed in all finance reports. |
| Register | A Register is a container for Contracts, which in turn hold Transactions and Invoices. Once the Register is created, you can add Contracts, Transactions, and Invoices to it by adding records to new and existing Customers. |
| Transaction | Contract line items, or the list of items agreed to in the contract, used for revenue recognition. |
| Item | An Item is a solution or product you license or sell. Each Transaction and Invoice Line Item must have an associated Item. When using a GL Connector, Items are typically created and managed in your GL and synced to Maxio Core. |
| Credit Memo | A credit memorandum is used to reduce the amount a customer owes from a previously issued Invoice. In Maxio Core, these are included in the Invoice List under the Type = Credit Memo. |
| Refund Receipt | A Refund Receipt is a QuickBooks Online construct that records a refund to a customer for a previously paid balance on an Invoice. This action results in both a cash and a revenue-impacting transaction with no impact on the invoices due amount. |
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