Subscription Management and Publication Management Software
This document will outline the management of subscriptions using Insight. The assumptions are as follows.
- The subscription management company has many subscribers.
- The subscription joining date is not conformed subscribers can start their subscription on a fixed date or any other date.
- The period of the subscription can be fixed of flexible.
- The billing periods are fixed or flexible.
- The automatic renewal or alerts of subscription expiry is fixed or flexible.
An example of a flexible subscription would be,
Company A runs a magazine, this is a bi-weekly magazine which sell subscription in either 1 month, 3 month, 6 month or 1 year. The subscriber can take out a subscription at any time in the year/edition cycle. This would mean that the subscriber regardless of the edition number they receive as their first, will receive editions till their period is over.
An example of a fixed subscription business would be,
Company B runs a magazine that is 12 issues per annum. Subscribers buy their subscription for the year. The billing/edition cycle is fixed to the monthly cycle. Note this could be monthly, weekly or daily it is just the period of subscription is the same for each subscriber. Should a subscriber join later during the edition cycle then they would be sold a pro-rata subscription.
You can run both fixed and flexible subscriptions with insight simultaneously. Each customer could subscribe to as many of your publications as required. Each publication could be either flexible or fixed or both.
Publication Management
In Insight you profile each of your publications, this would be the master publication. All the information relating to the publication as a whole would be stored or linked to this item.
Edition Management
Each publication can have as many editions as required. The editions can be created upfront or they can be created as required. The edition is linked to the Publication it belongs to. Each edition can then contain specific information, notes and transactions that relate specific to that edition. All documents, images and processing during the creation of the edition is tracked here.
Should you require more granular control over the creation of your editions, the workflow of the editions can be broken down into as granular level as you require. This could for example be; draft, design, copyright, print and delivery. Each one of these processes will have their own status tracking, notes and transactional information. This allows you to manage the entire development process of your edition.
Subscriptions
A subscription item is created for each of your customer’s subscriptions. The subscription item is linked to the Publication. All information, notes, correspondence with your customer including billing information is linked to the subscription.
At the end of the subscription cycle the subscriptions can be renewed or archived.
Reports Specific to Subscription Management
Customer Snapshot – this report will show you all the subscriptions that a customer has with you, the subscription status and any of the specific subscription properties that you require to view.
Publication Overview – this report shows you all the editions that are linked to the publication their status and any specific properties about the edition you require to view.
Edition Information – this report shows you an array of information about the edition. Information like current status, subscribers and milestones.
Billing Report – this reports shows you all the current billing requirements for the specific date range that you specify. Should you not purchase the billing module then you can use this report to give you all the information you need to generate the invoices manually in Insight.
Subscription Notices Report – this report gives you the expiry alerts for the specific publications that you have specified. You chose a alert threshold and the report automatically analyses all subscriptions to provide you with the soon to be expiring subscriptions. The information on this report is exportable for use in many popular communication products including Microsoft word for mail merges.
Additional Subscription Modules
Billing Module – the billing module will take care of all your invoice generation automatically. Invoices are generate based on your specific thresholds per edition or subscription cycle.
Subscription Expiry Communication – this module automatically send communication emails to your subscribers warning them of their upcoming subscription expiry. The can be customised as well as the triggers and thresholds.
Other Insight Features
All the other features offered in Insight are available to you and are fully integrated into the above configuration. With Insight you will be able to manage your financials, stock, workflow and many more business operations.
Should your business have other products or services then you will benefit from being able to configure and run those processes on the same system. Insight can hold multiple business operations with multiple different configurations.
All customer information is grouped to their account so current and historic views are provided giving you all the information to effectively deal with your customers and increase your service levels.
With Insight all transactions and their relevant notes are searchable, so as you use Insight your own knowledge base begins to grow even further increasing your speed to action and service levels.
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