What is the difference between the Charges and Orders export?

Charges and orders are closely related but each serves a unique purpose in the billing and fulfillment cycle of subscriptions. You can refer to Available exports in the Export Builder to see all the headers included in both exports. 

Charges

A charge represents an upcoming transaction and contains all associated line items. A charge can be a in a queued, pending, successful, or error status. A charge becomes successful when payment is successfully processed. At that point, Recharge generates an associated order, or multiple orders for prepaid subscriptions.

If you are looking to analyze payments or revenue data, use the Charges export.

Orders

An order is a record that represents the fulfillment of the items purchased in a charge. An order is created after the charge is successful. For prepaid subscriptions, multiple queued orders are created for the initial charge.

If you are looking to analyze prepaid orders, fulfillment, or delivery data, use the Orders export.