The Tabs Data Model

The Tabs Data Model organizes your revenue operations into core entities that cover every stage from contract creation to final payment. By standardizing around these building blocks, Tabs makes it easier to automate invoicing, track payments, and maintain a single source of truth for all your financial data.

Overview of Entities

1. Customers
   The businesses you’re billing. Customers have names, contact information, and custom fields like AEs and CSMs.

2. Contracts
   The binding agreements defining dates, payment terms, cancellation policies, and obligations. Each contract belongs to exactly one customer, but Tabs can infer the customer if a contract is uploaded without one.

3. Items
   The products or services in your general ledger and their respective accounting codes. The account associated with an item is Credited when the item is sold. That account is Debited during month-end close when revenue is recognized.

4. Revenue Categories
   Logical groupings for the products or services you offer. These groupings are used to simplify visualizations and reporting in Tabs.

5. Obligations
   The commitments you are responsible for how much they cost. Obligations relate to a GL Item and generate the line items that comprise Invoices.

6. Invoices
   Itemized requests for payment tied to obligations and contracts. Invoices contain Invoice Line Items and have a series of dates that are computed but can be modified. Invoices also generate Sales Tax.

7. Payments
   Recorded receipts that settle outstanding Invoices. Transactions are generally imported from your commercial bank and are applied to Invoices as Payments.

8. Coming Soon (Beta): Usage Events
   Track how customers consume usage-based products or services, enabling more accurate billing and forecasting.

How It All Fits Together

• Customers sign Contracts outlining Obligations to pay for products or services.
• Items ensure each invoice or sales order maps correctly into your accounting system.
• Revenue Categories provide higher-level grouping for obligations, which helps with reporting.
• Invoices are generated to request payment.
• Payments settle those invoices, reducing the overall obligations.
• Usage Events (Beta) can feed into the invoicing process to compute line item quantities and subtotals for usage-based pricing models.

By mapping your finance operations to these fundamental entities, Tabs simplifies your workflows and centralizes valuable financial data in one place.

Learn More

Dive deeper into each entity with the dedicated subpages below:

• Customers
• Contracts
• Items
• Revenue Categories
• Obligations
• Invoices
• Payments
• Events (Usage)