With this guide, our goal is to get you familiar with navigating core concepts in Maple.

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Maple’s No-code and Code-Integration Options

Maple as a platform can be leveraged in no-code mode until you need to integrate deeper billing capabilities into your product.

Maple also provides robust API capabilities to handle all actions that can be performed in the Maple web app as white-labeled experiences in your product. This also includes capabilities to handle usage-based or seat-based billing in your application.

Regardless of the mode you intend to use Maple in, we recommend getting an additional test account by contacting support@maplebilling.com that is separate and has distinct credentials from your production account so you can experiment with core concepts before deploying them to your live application.

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Company

When you sign up with Maple, a company is automatically provisioned for your application. All entities (as explained below) are specific to the company. The company can be configured with an address, preferred timezone, preferred currency and branding configuration to represent your product or business.

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Billable Items and Metrics

Billable items and metrics are the core units for billing.

Billable items represent distinct billable entities in your product such as Licenses, API Calls or Users. Items can be usage-based and transient such as API Calls or object-based and persistent such as Users.

Billable metrics are rules and aggregators that are applied on Billable Items to trigger metering for all kinds of billable items. These metrics query over events or objects to provide an aggregate value that is ultimately billed to the customer.

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Events and Objects

Maple supports metering of more transient usage-based items or more persistent object-based items in your product.

Events are used for metering usage-based metrics and objects are used for metering object-based metrics. Maple manages these two concepts distinctly because they made a difference when tracking MRR for your business.

Revenue generated through persistent objects (such as seats deployed) count towards recurring revenue while revenue generated through transient events (such as API calls) do not unless there are a minimum set of pre-purchased events.

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Prices and Plans

Pricing starts with defining item prices for each billable metric and then combining them into product pricing (or plans) with one or more billable components.

Product prices represent different offerings of your product such as a Basic Plan or Pro Plan.

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Customers

A customer represents a business or user you want to bill through Maple.

You can kick start billing for a customer with just an email address. However, for more complex requirements such as taxation, Maple would require a customer address.

Customers are key entities in the system that have events, objects, contracts, subscriptions, invoices, and payments associated with it.

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Subscriptions

A subscription represents a recurring service you provide to a customer. A subscription can contain one or more product pricing so this means that you can have a single invoice for a customer that subscribes to multiple product offerings.

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Contracts

A contract is a proposal for a subscription or one-time charge to a customer. Contracts include a signature step before the start of a subscription. This is a common mechanism leveraged in enterprise sales.

Maple Contracts simplify the full Quote-to-cash process by making it easy to create & share contacts, follow-up to get them signed, and then automatically create the associated subscriptions.

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Invoices and Payments

An invoice can represent recurring charges or one-time charges for your customer. Active subscriptions in Maple can also let you preview upcoming invoices. This is typically useful for usage-based charges.

Maple integrates with a number of payment providers to enable the last mile processing of payments for an invoice.