Concepts

These pages explain how Ownrecord models your business and your tax obligations. They're short, and each one links to the others where the ideas meet.

• Account modelOrganizations, legal entities and brands, how people get access through memberships, and how data stays isolated.
• Test and live modeEvery brand has a test mode and a live mode. Test mode is a complete parallel world where nothing touches real money or real tax obligations.
• Tax engineHow Ownrecord decides which tax applies to a sale, and why it stops a sale rather than guess.
• RegistrationsOwnrecord tracks, for each entity and tax regime, whether you're registered, in a grace period, below a threshold or blocked, and checkout follows that state.
• CatalogProducts, prices and features per brand. Every product has a tax category, prices are exact and immutable once used, and lookup keys let your code refer to "the current price" without hard-coding IDs.
• SubscriptionsA full subscription system with trials, seats, metered usage, proration, coupons, dunning and a customer portal, charged on your own processor account.
• EntitlementsFeatures and limits a brand grants through its products, resolved for each customer from what they've bought. Ownrecord says what a customer may use; your product enforces it.
• LedgerA real-time, append-only, double-entry ledger per legal entity. It's the source of truth for balances, revenue, tax payable and what your processor owes you.
• FilingsFiling periods, filing-ready tax reports generated from the ledger, and how a person or an authorized agent submits and pays each return.
• ApprovalsDecide what needs a person's approval. Agents and apps follow settings per risk tier, people follow two-person rules, and a call that needs approval answers HTTP 202 and runs exactly as requested once someone approves it.
• Money and exchange ratesAmounts are exact integers in micros, rounding happens only at defined points with a declared mode, and currency conversion uses ECB reference rates with exact fractions.
• CustomersA customer is a buyer of one brand. Ownrecord keeps its tax IDs with their verification, the location evidence of each purchase, and the country its purchases are taxed in.
• InvoicesEvery paid checkout issues an invoice or a receipt; you can also invoice customers yourself. Invoices are numbered without gaps in the brand's series, show the tax the customer pays, the legal notes the rules require, and have a PDF that never changes.
• Payment processorsConnect Stripe or Mollie to a legal entity. Ownrecord stores the keys encrypted, receives the processor's webhooks, charges the totals its own tax quotes compute, and fails over to a brand's secondary processor when the primary has problems.
• EventsEvery change Ownrecord records becomes an event. Receive your brand's events with webhooks, or read every event of your scope from the event feed, with a cursor that never skips or repeats one.
• WebhooksOwnrecord POSTs your brand's events to the endpoints you choose, signed with Ownrecord-Signature, and retries failed deliveries for 3 days.
• CheckoutA hosted checkout page that quotes the tax from where the customer is, takes the payment, and records the sale only when the processor confirms it, with the invoice, the ledger and the thresholds in one step.
• DiscountsCoupons, promotion codes and the discounts they become. A coupon is a percent or amount off for one, several or every billing period; promotion codes are what customers type; a discount is a coupon applied to a customer or subscription, with dates.
• Usage billingMetered prices bill what your customers use, in arrears. Your integration records usage events; Ownrecord counts each one once, aggregates them per day and bills each billing period's usage on the renewal invoice.
• Payment methodsCards your customers save at your processor, so subscriptions can charge renewals, upgrades and retries without the customer coming back.
• Test clocksMove time forward in test mode to watch trials end, subscriptions renew and cancellations take effect in seconds, exactly as they will in live mode.
• Collection and dunningWhat happens after an invoice is issued: retries of failed card payments, reminders for bank-transfer invoices, past-due grace, bank statement matching and the hosted invoice page.
• Wallets and creditsPrepaid credits live in wallets, one per customer and currency. Credits come from top-ups, credit packs, subscriptions and grants; usage reserves them and captures what was used. Unused credits expire; low-balance events and auto-reload keep wallets funded.
• LeasesLease a block of a customer's prepaid credits, meter high-frequency usage against it in your own service, and settle in batches, with a clear outcome if your service crashes.
• AlertsOwnrecord raises an alert when something needs a person, such as a registration deadline or a blocked jurisdiction. Every alert is in the console inbox; high and critical ones are also emailed to the people whose role handles them and posted to Slack.
• Compliance tasksOwnrecord turns compliance work it can't do itself, such as submitting a registration or filing a return, into tasks with everything needed to do it. People or agents claim them, do the work and submit the outcome with evidence.
• DisputesWhen a customer's bank reverses a payment, Ownrecord books the chargeback and the fee when the money is taken, freezes the customer's wallets, alerts support, and builds the evidence pack you submit to the processor. Inquiries take nothing until they escalate. Won disputes are reversed; lost ones raise the customer's risk.
• Refunds and credit notesA refund gives a card payment back and issues a credit note that corrects the original invoice at its original tax rates. Support refunds up to a limit; finance above it.
• Reconciliation and accounting exportsEvery day Ownrecord matches each processor's balance transactions to its payments, refunds and disputes, books processor fees and payouts, and queues what doesn't match. Accounting exports give your accountant the journal and the registers.
• Custom domainsServe a brand's checkout and customer portal on your own domain, such as pay.acme.com. Two DNS records, a verification, and every link of the brand uses it.
• LanguagesThe hosted checkout, invoices, credit notes and customer emails speak English, German, French, Croatian, Italian and Spanish. How the language is chosen, and what stays English.
• Customer portalA page per brand where your customers sign in with an email link to see their invoices, pay open ones, manage their subscriptions, credits, cards and billing details, and download their data, in their own language.
• Risk controlsPrepaid credits attract stolen cards. Each brand screens its payments with rules — velocity limits, new-customer limits, blocklists, disposable emails and a risk score — that refuse a payment, ask the bank for 3-D Secure, or hold it for review. Fresh balances can be capped.
• Agents and appsMachines that act in your organization through OAuth 2.1, your own agents with client credentials, partner apps you install, and MCP clients acting for a person, always with no more access than a person gave them.
• Audit logEvery change in your organization, who made it and on whose behalf, kept in append-only hash chains you can verify, and visible for your plan's retention window.
• The assistantThe console's built-in assistant answers from the docs, the tax knowledge base and your data, and prepares changes that run only when you click Confirm on a preview Ownrecord computed, as you, under your permissions.
• Jurisdiction coverageHow the knowledge base behind the tax engine is researched, reviewed and published, what each coverage level means, and which records live and test mode use.
• Onboarding and going liveSign up, create your organization, follow the onboarding checklist, verify your legal entity, and take a brand live once its go-live checklist holds.
• Organization lifecycleTransfer ownership, delete your account, export everything, and close an organization while its obligations to customers and tax authorities run to the end.
• Terms and acceptanceOwnrecord's own legal documents, their versions, and how your organization accepts the Terms of Service and the Data Processing Agreement, including material changes announced 30 days ahead.
• Emails from OwnrecordThe emails Ownrecord itself sends you about your account, which ones you can turn off, and how product updates need your opt-in.
• Support accessOwnrecord staff can't see your customers, invoices, ledger or settings unless you let them, for a reason, a mode and a time you approve. Every request they make is in your audit log and Access log.
• Your Ownrecord planHow Ownrecord bills your organization with its own billing engine, the plans and their limits, the volume fee on live payments, plan changes, the billing portal, and what happens when a payment fails.
• E-invoicingWhere the law requires structured e-invoices, Ownrecord generates an EN 16931 e-invoice (UBL 2.1, Peppol BIS Billing 3.0) for every invoice and credit note your entity routes to a provider, sends it after the document is issued, and follows its status.