Resolve Customer Account question; add commercial subscription research

Record B2B SaaS subscriber tenancy and Stripe billing source notes. Resolve
the Customer Account open question: reject it as canonical, add Commercial
Record and Commercial Relationship to the Record and relationship layers, and
document Subscriber as a convenience term only.
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2026-06-21 20:35:36 +02:00
parent 1c1b5c9bc6
commit 3ccf841095
11 changed files with 345 additions and 26 deletions

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@@ -146,15 +146,39 @@ An organization or other actor recognized by a legal system.
## Customer
An actor in a commercial or service-consumption relationship.
A commercial role played by an actor (usually an Organization, sometimes a
Natural Person for individual subscriptions) that consumes services from a
vendor.
Customer is a relationship role, not automatically a tenant or organization.
Customer is a relationship role, not a record type and not interchangeable with
Tenant, Organization, Account, or Commercial Record.
## Vendor
An actor in a service-provider relationship.
A commercial role played by an actor (usually an Organization) that provides
services to customer actors.
Vendor is a relationship role, not automatically a tenant or organization.
Vendor is a relationship role, not a tenant, realm, or organization synonym.
## Commercial Relationship
A typed relationship connecting a vendor actor to a customer actor for a
commercial or subscription purpose within a stated scope.
May reference a Commercial Record for billing state. Does not imply membership,
authorization, or identity equivalence.
## Commercial Record
A record in a billing, CRM, or commerce system that tracks payment methods,
subscriptions, invoices, contracts, or commercial contact details for an actor
or tenant.
Examples: Stripe Customer, Salesforce Account, subscription billing profile.
Commercial Record is in the Record layer. It is not an Account (login), not an
Organization actor, and not a Customer Account. Link it to Actor, Tenant, or
Scope via Identifier binding or Commercial Relationship.
## Community
@@ -292,3 +316,19 @@ pseudonymization with separately stored re-identification keys.
`User` may be used in prose when quoting or mapping external systems, but it
should not be a canonical root concept. Resolve it to a specific canonical
concept before using it in model definitions.
## Non-Canonical Convenience Term: Subscriber
`Subscriber` (common in Auth0 B2B SaaS documentation) usually means the
organization or party holding a subscription and tenant. Resolve to Organization
+ Customer Relationship role + Tenant Scope, or to Natural Person + Tenant for
individual subscriptions. Do not model as Customer Account or Account.
## Non-Canonical Convenience Term: Customer Account
Do not use `Customer Account` as a canonical term. Resolve by layer:
- login/access → Account;
- subscribing company → Organization + Customer Relationship role;
- billing/CRM record → Commercial Record;
- isolation boundary → Tenant.