Orders, Transactions & Line Items
Some useful key structures and terms
Orders
Whether a customer purchases something through your web shop or through your EPOS, it starts life as an Order. An order can contain multiple items, be they gift cards or retail items or any mix of each. This is pretty typical for any ecommerce platform, as you might expect.
Transactions
Transactions represent an exchange of value between a Toggle account and an end-consumer or third party. A typical example of such an exchange would be for a new Order, whereby the transaction represents the payment taken from the consumer. However, a transaction could also relate to other monetary exchanges, such as a refund to a customer, for example.
Line items
A Line Item can represent an individual Sale, Redemption, Breakage (expiry), Reversal or gift card Balance Transfer (inbound or outbound). Line Items can relate to both orders and transactions. Indeed, we consider Line Items the "glue" that ultimately links everything together in our data structure.
Cards
If a new order contains a gift or other pre-paid voucher, we'll create a Card. A card is like a mini bank account, with a full credit/debit history associated with it. The changes of balance within an individual card we call Balance Adjustments. In turn, these balance changes always relate back to the Line Item that explains why and who made that adjustment.
Further reading
If you want to delve further into how we organise our data, our primer for FDs / CFOs might be useful further reading:
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