Integration and finance data glossary.

Accounts payable is the money a business owes its suppliers for goods and services received but not yet paid for.

Accounts receivable is the money customers owe a business for goods or services already delivered and invoiced.

Accrual accounting records revenue when it is earned and expenses when they are incurred, regardless of when cash changes hands.

Agentic commerce is buying, selling and back-office work carried out by AI agents acting on behalf of people or businesses, within set limits.

AP automation is software that captures, approves, pays and records supplier bills with less manual work in the payables process.

API passthrough lets you call a platform's native endpoint through an integration provider, reusing its authentication, rate limiting and logging.

An API rate limit caps how many requests a client can make in a time window; requests beyond the cap are rejected or delayed.

An audit trail is a chronological record of who did what, when and to which record, kept so changes can be reviewed and explained.

A balance sheet reports what a company owns, owes and the owners' equity at a specific date, where assets equal liabilities plus equity.

A bank feed is a stream of account transactions sent into accounting software so bookkeepers can reconcile them against the ledger.

Bank reconciliation matches the cash transactions in a company's ledger to its bank statement and explains every difference.

Bill pay is the process or software for paying supplier bills, by ACH, card, wire or check, and recording each payment against the bill.

Change data capture detects inserts, updates and deletes in a source system and emits them as a stream of change events.

A chart of accounts is the list of every account a company uses to record transactions, grouped into assets, liabilities, equity, income and expenses.

A connector is the code that implements an integration with one platform: its authentication, endpoints, data mapping and error handling.

A credit note is a document a seller issues to reduce what a customer owes, for returns, pricing errors or goodwill.

Cursor pagination uses an opaque token that points to a position in a result set, so each request returns the records after that point.

Data mapping defines how fields in one system correspond to fields in another, including any transformations between them.

A data model defines the objects a system works with, their fields and types, and the relationships between them.

Data residency is the requirement or choice to store and process data in a specific country or region.

Embedded iPaaS is integration infrastructure a software vendor builds into its own product so its customers can connect their other tools.

Embedded lending is credit offered inside a non-bank product, such as a software platform or marketplace, at the moment a customer needs it.

An ERP is a business system that runs finance alongside operations such as purchasing, inventory, orders and manufacturing on one database.

ERP consolidation combines financial data from several ERPs or entities into one view for group reporting, without necessarily replacing any system.

ETL is the process of extracting data from source systems, transforming it into a target shape and loading it into a destination such as a data warehouse.

Event-driven integration connects systems by reacting to events, such as an order placed or an invoice paid, instead of polling on a schedule.

The general ledger is a company's complete record of financial transactions, organized by account, from which financial statements are produced.

A GTIN, or Global Trade Item Number, is a globally unique product identifier from GS1, encoded in barcodes such as UPC and EAN.

An idempotency key is a unique value sent with a write request so that retrying the request never performs the action twice.

Incremental sync transfers only records that changed since the last sync, instead of copying the full dataset every time.

An integration platform provides the shared parts of integrations, such as auth, connectors, sync and monitoring, so teams do not rebuild them.

An intercompany transaction is a sale, loan, charge or transfer between two entities that belong to the same corporate group.

An inventory level is the quantity of a SKU at a location, usually split into on hand, committed to orders and available to sell.

An invoice is a seller's request for payment that lists goods or services delivered, amounts, taxes and payment terms.

iPaaS is cloud software for building, running and monitoring integrations and automated workflows between applications.

An item master is the ERP's authoritative record for each item a business buys, makes, stocks or sells, with its codes, units, costs and accounts.

A journal entry records a financial transaction as balanced debits and credits to accounts in the general ledger.

A marketplace settlement is the periodic statement and payout a marketplace sends a seller, netting sales against fees, refunds, reserves and adjustments.

MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard for exposing tools and data to AI models through a consistent client-server interface.

Multi-entity accounting keeps separate books for several legal entities in one system, with shared structures and consolidated reporting.

Normalized data has been converted from many source formats into one consistent structure, field naming and set of value conventions.

OAuth 2.0 is an authorization standard that lets a user grant an application limited access to their account on another service without sharing a password.

Open banking lets customers share their bank account data with, or initiate payments through, third-party providers via secure APIs, with consent.

An order management system collects orders from every sales channel and manages them through allocation, fulfillment, returns and refunds.

Pagination splits a large API result into pages that the client fetches one request at a time.

A pass-through API forwards each request to the source platform in real time and returns the result without storing the data.

A payout is a transfer of funds from a payment processor or marketplace to a merchant's bank account, net of fees, refunds and reserves.

A PIM is a system that stores and enriches product data, such as titles, attributes, images and translations, then publishes it to sales channels.

A profit and loss statement shows revenue, costs and expenses over a period, ending in net profit or loss.

A purchase order is a buyer's document authorizing a purchase from a supplier at stated quantities, prices and terms.

Reconciliation is the process of comparing two sets of records, such as the ledger and a bank statement, and resolving any differences.

Reverse ETL copies modeled data from a data warehouse back into operational tools such as CRMs, ad platforms and support systems.

Sales tax nexus is a connection to a US state strong enough that a business must register, collect and remit that state's sales tax.

A sandbox is an isolated test environment with sample data, where you can build and test an integration without touching real customer accounts.

A SKU, or stock keeping unit, is a code a business assigns to each distinct item it sells or stocks, down to size and color.

SOC 2 is an AICPA attestation framework in which an independent auditor reports on a service provider's controls for security and related criteria.

SP-API is Amazon's REST API for sellers and vendors to access orders, listings, inventory, reports, finances and fulfillment data programmatically.

A subsidiary is a company controlled by a parent company; in an ERP, it is the entity record that keeps that company's books separate.

Supplier enablement is the work of identifying a business's suppliers and moving them onto a new payment method, such as virtual cards or ACH.

Sync-and-store is an integration model that copies data from source platforms on a schedule and serves reads from that stored copy.

Three-way match checks a supplier invoice against the purchase order and the goods receipt before the invoice is approved for payment.

Token refresh exchanges a long-lived refresh token for a new short-lived access token, so an integration keeps working without the user signing in again.

A trial balance lists every general ledger account with its debit or credit balance at a date, where total debits must equal total credits.

Underwriting data is the financial and operating information a lender uses to decide whether to extend credit, how much and on what terms.

A unified API is one interface and data model over many similar platforms, so you integrate once instead of once per platform.

A product variant is one specific version of a product, defined by options such as size, color or material, usually with its own SKU, price and stock.

A vendor bill is a supplier's request for payment, recorded in accounts payable as money the business owes.

A virtual card is a card number issued digitally, often for one supplier or one payment, with its own limit and expiry.

A webhook is an HTTP request a system sends to your endpoint when something changes, so you learn about events without polling.

White-label authentication is a connection flow shown under your brand, so customers authorize third-party systems without seeing the vendor behind it.

Write-back is when an integration creates, updates or deletes records in the source system, not only reads from it.