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A counterparty is whoever money goes to — a supplier, a contractor, a seller, or your own sub-client’s own customer. You save one once, with the details money needs to reach them, and reuse it for every later payment. Nothing has to be re-entered, and a mistake is corrected in one place rather than on every transfer.

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What it holds

Two things: who they are — a person or a company, with the identifying details the rail requires — and where money reaches them, which is either a bank account or a wallet address. Which of those two it carries decides the rail, and the counterparty is where that name lives: a bank account is saved as ACH or WIRE, a wallet as WALLET. Everything downstream — what a payment costs and how fast it lands — follows from that one choice. See Rail.

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Why it is saved rather than sent

Paying the same supplier ten times should not mean sending their bank details ten times. Each send is a chance to mistype an account number, and a wrong number on a payment is not always recoverable. Saving the counterparty once moves that risk to a single moment you can check.

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What it is called elsewhere

In the API reference a counterparty is a recipient. The word is the same idea throughout — see The recipient object.
A counterparty is not a sub-client. A sub-client is your customer, whose money it is. A counterparty is who that money is going to, and Kira does not verify them the way it verifies a sub-client.