QAD and Chargebee integration

What moves between them

The main flow runs from Chargebee into QAD. After each billing cycle, ml-connector reads Chargebee invoices, payments, transactions, and credit notes and posts them into QAD against the matching customer and GL accounts, so recurring revenue is recorded without re-keying. Customer records are aligned in both directions so a customer added in QAD appears in Chargebee and a customer changed in Chargebee updates QAD. Chargebee has no purchase orders, vendors, or chart of accounts, so the integration stays on the sold side and never moves procurement or AP data. Item and item-price references are mapped so each billed line maps to a valid QAD account.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores both credential sets encrypted. On the Chargebee side it sends the API key as the Basic auth username with an empty password, keeping the mandatory trailing colon that some HTTP libraries drop, and derives the correct base URL from the site name and region so an EU site is never called against the US host. On the QAD side it accepts the full tenant URL per customer, since QAD publishes no shared base address, and validates entity paths against that instance. Customers and items are mapped first, so every Chargebee invoice line references a customer and account that already exists in QAD. Because QAD cloud is pull-only and offset-paginated reads cap at 100 records, ml-connector polls Chargebee on a schedule tied to your billing calendar and pages through results, and it can also consume Chargebee webhooks where enabled, re-fetching each event by id rather than trusting the pushed payload. Chargebee rate limits return HTTP 429 with a Retry-After header, which ml-connector honors with exponential backoff and jitter, and it deduplicates events by their unique id. Every record carries a full audit trail and can be replayed if a downstream call fails.

A real-world example

A growing B2B software company with a few hundred employees runs QAD Adaptive ERP for finance and operations and bills its subscription product through Chargebee. Before the integration, the finance team exported invoice and payment reports from Chargebee each month and re-keyed the totals into QAD, then spent the first days of close reconciling the customer list and chasing payments that had not been recorded against the right account. With QAD and Chargebee connected, each cycle's invoices, payments, and credit notes flow into QAD automatically against the matching customer, and customer changes keep the two systems aligned. Month-end close starts with recurring revenue already recorded, and the manual re-keying step is gone.

What you can do

• •Post Chargebee invoices, payments, transactions, and credit notes into QAD after each billing cycle, against the right customer and accounts.
• •Keep QAD and Chargebee customer records aligned in both directions as they are created and changed.
• •Map Chargebee items and item prices to QAD accounts so every billed line lands on a valid account.
• •Authenticate Chargebee with zero-password Basic auth and the correct regional base URL, and QAD with its tenant-specific token.
• •Poll on a schedule tied to your billing calendar, with offset paging, 429 backoff, retries, and a full audit trail on every record.

Questions

Which direction does data move between QAD and Chargebee?

The main flow is Chargebee into QAD. Invoices, payments, transactions, and credit notes move from Chargebee into QAD, while customer records are aligned in both directions. Chargebee has no purchase orders, vendors, or general ledger, so the integration stays on the sold side and does not move procurement or AP data.

How does the integration handle Chargebee's Basic auth and regional sites?

Chargebee uses HTTP Basic auth where the API key is the username and the password is empty, including a mandatory trailing colon that some HTTP libraries drop. ml-connector stores the key encrypted, formats the header correctly, and derives the base URL from the site name and region so an EU or AU site is never called against the US host. Test and live sites use separate keys, which are kept distinct.

Does the integration use Chargebee webhooks or polling?

It can use both. Because QAD cloud is pull-only, ml-connector polls Chargebee on a schedule tied to your billing calendar and pages through offset-based results that cap at 100 records. Where Chargebee webhooks are enabled, it consumes events secured by Basic auth or a URL token, re-fetches each event by id rather than trusting the pushed payload, and deduplicates by the unique event id.