ChargeOn terminology¶
ChargeOn uses a few words in a specific way. This page defines them, so that the rest of the documentation can use them without stopping to explain.
Two of them are worth reading before anything else, because ChargeOn uses them differently from the way the payments industry usually does.
Payment Type and Payment Method mean something specific here
In most payment products, a "payment method" is a card or a bank account.
In ChargeOn, Payment Type is what the customer pays with. Payment Method is when and how often you charge them. The screens use these words in that sense, so this documentation does too. If you import the industry meaning, every screen will read backwards.
The two that matter most¶
Payment Type — what the customer pays with.
| Type | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Card | Credit and debit cards |
| Bank | Direct bank debits, including ACH and e-check in the United States, and SEPA in the eurozone |
| Payment Link | A page the customer pays on themselves, rather than you taking the details |
Cash, cheque and wire transfer are also payment types, used when recording a payment that happened outside ChargeOn. See Offline payment.
Payment Method — when and how often the charge happens.
| Method | What it does |
|---|---|
| Instant | Charges immediately |
| Scheduled | Charges once, on a future date you set |
| Recurring | Charges repeatedly on a schedule until it ends |
One place uses a longer list
When you configure a gateway, its Supported Payment Modes field offers more than these three. That field describes what the gateway is capable of, not what a user picks when taking a payment — so Recurring appears there split into its two forms, Installment and Subscription, alongside bank-specific modes. The three above are what your team chooses on the payment screen.
A to Z¶
3D Secure — an extra identity check on a card payment, run by the card issuer before the payment is approved. The customer typically confirms with a one-time code. It reduces fraud and can shift liability for disputed transactions.
ACH — the bank transfer network used in the United States. One of the forms a Bank payment takes.
Advance payment — money collected before there is an invoice to put it against. ChargeOn records it as a credit memo, which is then available to settle an invoice when one is raised.
It is not applied automatically by default
Applying the credit is normally a deliberate action, not something that happens on its own. Automatic application runs only for recurring plans, and only where that has been switched on for the credit memo — the setting is off by default. A payment link is always raised for the full amount; any credit is applied separately.
Authorisation hold — reserving money on a card without taking it. The funds are held by the card issuer while you confirm you can deliver. You then either capture the payment or void the hold. Cards only; bank payments cannot be held this way.
Automated collection — a set of rules that chase overdue payments for you: reminder emails, fresh payment links, and optional retries against a saved payment method. Configured by pointing and clicking, with no code.
BECS — the bank transfer network used in Australia. You will see this word on screen instead of "Bank Payment" when a bank payment is in Australian dollars. It is not a separate payment type to choose; it is what ChargeOn calls a bank payment in that currency.
Capture — taking money that was previously reserved by an authorisation hold. The opposite of void.
Checkout Experience — the setting on each payment gateway that decides what your customer sees when they pay. It is the single most consequential choice you make when connecting a gateway, because it determines who handles the card details.
| Experience | What the customer sees | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Direct API | A payment form that belongs to ChargeOn, inside Salesforce | Your org handles the card details, which carries the highest compliance obligation |
| Hosted Fields | A payment form whose card boxes belong to the gateway, embedded in the ChargeOn page | Card numbers never pass through your Salesforce org |
| Redirect | The gateway's own checkout page, away from Salesforce | The gateway handles everything, including the card details |
Credit memo — a credit issued to a customer that can be applied against an invoice or a future balance, without money moving. Used for overpayments, goodwill and adjustments. Voiding a credit memo cancels only the part that has not already been applied.
Gateway fallback — automatically retrying a declined payment on a backup gateway, so a single gateway problem does not cost you the sale.
Fallback has real limits
Fallback applies to card payments on gateways using the Direct API checkout experience. A payment taken through hosted fields or a redirect cannot fall back, because the customer's card details were entered somewhere ChargeOn cannot re-use.
A recurring plan whose first charge succeeds on a backup gateway stays on that gateway for the rest of its life.
Guest user — the anonymous identity Salesforce uses for someone visiting a public page without logging in. Your customers pay through a payment link as a guest user, which is why its permissions have to be set up carefully and kept narrow.
Headless 360 — ChargeOn's surface for external AI tools, letting them work with payments without anyone opening Salesforce. Every payment still needs a person to confirm it explicitly. It is never fully automatic.
Instant payment — a charge taken immediately, in real time, from a Salesforce record.
Invoice — a bill raised before payment is taken, tracked through statuses: Due, Paid, Partially Paid, Overdue, Processing, Authorized, Void and Closed.
Late fee — a charge added automatically to an invoice that passes its due date, subject to any grace period you configure.
Level 2 card data — extra detail such as tax amount, purchase order number and customer code, sent with a business card transaction. Card networks charge lower fees for transactions carrying it, so it can reduce processing costs on corporate cards.
MCP — the open standard that lets AI tools connect to systems in a consistent way. It is the mechanism behind Headless 360.
Net terms — the window a customer has to pay an invoice, such as Net 30, and the rules that apply when they miss it.
Offline payment — a payment that happened outside ChargeOn — cash, a cheque, a wire transfer — recorded in Salesforce so that your revenue picture is complete. You can attach a receipt as proof.
Payment gateway — the service that actually moves the money between the customer's bank or card and yours. ChargeOn connects 20 of them, and you can run several at once.
Payment link — a secure page, with its own web address and QR code, where a customer pays without you handling their card. Payment links work for instant, scheduled and recurring payments.
Payment object — the Salesforce record a payment is taken against. It can be a standard object such as Opportunity, or any custom object you use to track work worth billing.
Payment orchestration — managing payments across several gateways at once rather than being tied to one: routing each transaction to the right gateway, retrying elsewhere on failure, and reporting on all of it in one place.
PCI-DSS — the security standard governing how card data is handled. How much of it applies to your organisation depends on your Checkout Experience: a gateway-hosted form keeps card numbers out of your Salesforce org entirely, while ChargeOn's own form does not.
Reconciliation — comparing what ChargeOn recorded against what the gateway actually processed, and flagging anything matched, unmatched or mismatched, so the books can be closed with confidence.
Recurring payment — an automatic series of charges. Every recurring plan runs on one of four bases:
| Basis | How it ends |
|---|---|
| Count | After a fixed number of charges |
| Final amount | When a total has been collected, with any remainder in the last charge |
| End date | On a date you set, with the total spread evenly until then |
| Subscription | It does not — a fixed amount is charged every cycle until you stop it |
Frequencies available: weekly, fortnightly (labelled Biweekly on screen), monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and yearly.
Refund — returning money from a completed payment, in full or in part. It creates its own linked transaction record, so the original payment and its refund are both visible.
Register token — saving a customer's payment details securely for later use, without charging them now.
Remote site — a Salesforce setting that authorises your org to contact an external web address. You add one for each payment gateway you connect; without it, Salesforce blocks the connection.
Salesforce-native — built and run entirely inside Salesforce. No separate application, no second login, and no payment data leaving your Salesforce environment. Different from a product that merely connects to Salesforce from outside.
Salesforce Site — a public web page hosted by Salesforce that visitors reach without logging in. ChargeOn serves payment links from one.
Scheduled payment — a single charge set to run on a future date. It runs once. You can change the date, or cancel it, any time before it runs.
SEPA — the bank transfer scheme used across the eurozone. One of the forms a Bank payment takes.
Surcharge — a fee added to a card payment to recover processing costs. Shown to the customer before they confirm. It can be applied to credit cards only, with exceptions set globally, per gateway, or per customer.
Tokenisation — replacing card details with a meaningless substitute value, so the real number is never stored in Salesforce. The token can be charged again later, but is useless to anyone who obtains it.
Transaction history — the record of every payment attempt, successful or not, with its amount, status, gateway, type and timestamp. The single place to look for what happened.
Unresolved transaction — a payment that did not finish cleanly, held for review rather than lost. An administrator can resolve it or create the missing transaction record.
Verify credentials — the button that checks whether the details you entered for a gateway actually work.
One gateway always reports failure
NMI does not offer a way to check credentials, so Verify Credentials always reports failure for it. This is expected and does not mean your details are wrong. Confirm NMI is working by taking a test payment instead.
Void — releasing an authorisation hold without taking the money. The opposite of capture. Once voided, the reserved funds are freed and no payment is taken.