Context
Welcome to the documentation of the subscription management software ProAbono.
ProAbono allows you to easily manage your customers’ subscriptions and simplify the billing process.
In this documentation, you will find a comprehensive list of technical terms, jargon, acronyms, and other expressions specific to ProAbono and the subscription management industry in general. This glossary has been created to help you understand these terms and better utilize ProAbono.
It is important to understand these terms to navigate efficiently through our interfaces, interpret reports and data, and communicate with your team and customers.
The glossary is organized by major functional section, and each term is accompanied by a precise and concise definition to help you better understand how they are used in the context of subscription management.
We hope this glossary will be useful to you throughout your use of ProAbono. If you have any questions or comments about the glossary or the interface, please feel free to contact us via the chat directly accessible on your interface.
Catalog
| Terminology | Description |
|---|---|
| Business | A business represents your organization and is the resource that encompasses your entire activity. It is a global environment in which you can model your services to market them as subscriptions to your customers. Note: a business is associated with a unique billing address. |
| Segment | A segment is a distribution channel designed to market a service based on a specific market, customer type, different pricing, currency, etc. Segments are a way to partition your activity within your ProAbono business. |
| Catalog | Brings together all the resources associated with modeling your service. Offers, features, offer grids, discounts, etc. |
| Offer | An offer defines a set of features describing a service. It also contains the frequency and billing rules. |
| Feature | A feature defines a service or an element associated with an offer. In addition to the base price, an offer can be associated with a different pricing plan for each feature. |
| Discount | A discount defines a percentage or a fixed amount to be applied to the fees related to a subscription or a feature. It is also defined by an application duration. |
| Customer | A resource that contains all essential information about a customer, such as billing information, payment information, etc. |
| Subscription | A subscription represents the services subscribed to by a customer. The subscription is linked to the offer subscribed to by the customer. |
| Invoice | An invoice is a document issued by a company to its customer, detailing the services sold to them. |
| Credit Note | A credit note is a document issued by a company to its customer, notifying them that a credit has been applied to their account. |
Payment Gateways
| Terminology | Description |
|---|---|
| Payment Gateway | The virtual equivalent of a credit card terminal, a payment gateway is your portal for accepting online payments (everything from card payments to direct debit payments to payments via online wallets). |
| Test Gateway | A test gateway allows you to visualize all possible scenarios associated with a payment request to a gateway. Payment success, failure for invalid or insufficient fund cards, etc. You can validate your processes without triggering actual transactions. Note: they are only available in the test environment. |
| Bank Debit | A bank debit is a transaction carried out by the merchant directly on the customer’s bank account. For this, the merchant must have a mandate signed by the customer authorizing direct debits from their bank account. |
| SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) | The Single Euro Payments Area (or SEPA) enables payments between European countries to be as easy and secure as domestic payments, thanks to the establishment of three European payment methods: bank transfers, direct debits, and card payments. |
| 3D Secure | 3-D Secure (3DS) is an additional authentication protocol implemented by card networks to increase security for online card transactions. |
| Chargeback | When a customer disputes a transaction directly with the bank, it results in a debit reversal. This situation occurs when using a payment method such as bank debit (e.g., SEPA) and the transaction is rejected due to invalid or insufficient funds. |
| Dunning | Dunning ensures that invoices with failed payments undergo a dunning cycle (invoice reminders) and follow-up (email notifications). Dunning is the primary payment collection mechanism for payment failures due to insufficient funds. |
Subscription Flow & Customer Portal
| Terminology | Description |
|---|---|
| Hosted Pages | A global term used to define the sequence of pages in the subscription flow and the ProAbono customer portal. |
| Custom Domain | It is possible to have your website’s domain (instead of ProAbono’s domain) in the URLs of the hosted pages. |
| Subscription Flow | The subscription flow is defined by a sequence of pages that allow the customer to choose an offer, customize their subscription (optional), register their payment method, and subscribe. |
| Offer Page | The offer page allows you to display public offers that can be subscribed to start a subscription. This page is the entry point into the subscription flow. |
| Customer Workflows | There are several journeys that allow you to empower your customers to perform different actions within the hosted pages. Whether it’s starting a subscription from offer selection, changing the offer, or canceling, you can adapt the journeys to your needs. |
| Customer Portal | The customer portal represents a set of pages accessible to your customers in an authenticated manner. It is intended for users of your online service to find and access all the information related to them: – Subscription(s) – Payment method – Billing information |
Data Privacy
| Terminology | Description |
|---|---|
| GDPR | The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a directive on the protection of personal data for individuals in the EU. |
| Consent Management | The consent management feature of ProAbono allows you to collect consent from your customers during subscription and payment method registration. |
| Personal Data Management | Personal data management and anonymization in ProAbono allow you to comply with GDPR guidelines regarding the data retention policies of your customers. |
Usages & Access Rights
| Terminology | Description |
|---|---|
| Usage | Usage represents the variable part of a subscription (options, metrics). Usage reflects the services you grant/deliver within your application. In ProAbono, usage is defined by features and their configuration. |
| Access Rights | When a user subscribes to an offer, you simultaneously grant them access rights to your service. These access rights largely result from the chosen offer and the features it comprises. Access rights in ProAbono are defined by the usages of each feature for a given subscription. |
| On/Off Features | A feature or service whose access is either available (when the feature is activated) or unavailable to a user (when the feature is deactivated). |
| Limited Features | Functionality or service defined by a quantity delivered to users recurrently with predefined numerical limits. A minimum quantity can be included/offered, and the rest can be configured according to your chosen pricing model. |
| Usage-based Features | Functionality or service defined by a quantity consumed by your users with predefined numerical limits. A minimum quantity can be included/offered, and the rest can be configured according to your chosen pricing model. Here, the consumed quantities must be declared to ProAbono for billing purposes. |
| Public Offer | An offer that is publicly available and can be chosen by users on ProAbono’s offer presentation page. It will result in subscriptions when selected by users. |
| Private Offer | An offer that is still under development and/or not publicly available. |
| Disabled Offer | Disabled offers are those you no longer wish to provide or plan to retire. Disabled offers cannot be subscribed to by users or modified to add new elements. They will be archived but will continue to be associated with existing subscriptions for which they were the basis of subscription. |
| Trial Period | The trial period allows you to specify the duration during which you want your user to have access to your service/features through a specific offer. |
| Minimum Commitment | The minimum commitment prevents the customer from changing the offer or canceling the subscription for a defined period of time. The trial period is not counted in this commitment. Once the commitment duration has elapsed, the subscription will renew continuously according to its periodicity. |