When a subscriber does not pay their invoice, you will typically want to send reminders/dunning notices and suspend delivery of the subscribed product – whether it’s a printed newspaper or magazine, or access to a digital service.
Iteras has advanced mechanisms for handling customers who fail to pay their invoices. These are described below.
Reminders (dunning)
Iteras can be configured to send up to three dunning notices, each with its own fee. The dunning procedure is set up and activated in the configuration of the business unit.
Automatic and Manual Suspension
Automatic suspension of the subscription – meaning a stop in delivery – is configured under business policies. Typically, a general policy is set up on the business unit, but specific policies can also be defined for campaigns or individual subscriptions, if different behavior is desired in certain cases.
Suspension can be triggered at different stages of the dunning procedure.
If a suspended subscription is paid, it is automatically reactivated. If a subscriber notifies that payment is on the way, but it has not yet been received by the publisher, you may choose to trust the subscriber and extend the due date on the invoice, which will immediately lift the suspension. If the subscriber is not truthful, you risk providing additional days of free delivery. Alternatively, you can rely on automatic reactivation once payment is registered in Iteras.
There is no automatic notification sent to the subscriber about the suspension.
A suspended subscription is not automatically renewed. If a later payment is made, the renewal will happen at that point.
Manual suspension can be set as an option during holiday registration.
Compensation for Suspended Period
When a subscriber has been suspended for a period, they miss out on deliveries/access during that time. If the subscriber later pays their bill, they don’t receive full value for their money. As a publisher, you may choose to consider this the subscriber’s responsibility, but Iteras also allows automatic handling by either extending the subscription by the suspended period or crediting the proportional value of the suspended period. This is configured via a business policy.
Automatic Cancellation of Subscription
At some point, a publisher may consider an unpaid subscription to be one that will not be paid. At this stage, it makes sense to cancel the subscription entirely.
Automatic cancellation can be configured via a business policy to happen a set number of days after suspension due to non-payment.
The cancellation does not affect any of the subscriber’s other subscriptions that may be paid.
At cancellation, the remaining subscription period (from the time of cancellation) is credited, and the invoice is resent as a payment request with the credit deducted.
The suspension period is handled according to the settings under compensation for suspension. If no compensation is selected, it is not credited. If crediting or extension is selected, crediting takes place in both cases.
After this, the standard dunning procedure applies again to the resent payment request, if that too remains unpaid. Unpaid invoices will eventually receive the status “In arrears,” which distinguishes them from invoices related to merely suspended subscriptions. From there, it is up to the publisher to initiate any debt collection.