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 ten dunning notices, each with its own fee. The dunning procedure is set up and activated in the configuration of the business unit. Read more about this in the article on the reminder (dunning) procedure.
Settings
To change the default procedures for suspension and crediting, go to the business policy.
Open the Account menu in the top-right corner > click Primary settings > open the relevant business policy, and scroll down to the section Unpaid due invoices, which appears after configuring the reminder procedure.
Here you can configure rules for:
Suspend automatically subscriptions when
Stop automatically subscriptions when:
Credit defaulted invoices automatically if a subscriber is inactive for
In the section below, we explain in more detail what each setting covers, as well as the available options.
Automatic Suspension
Automatic suspension of the subscription (i.e., stopping delivery) is configured by default in a top-level policy for the business entity. If needed, you can also set up override policies for campaigns or individual subscriptions if a different setting is desired in specific 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.
Crediting / 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.
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.
Debt collection
When you’ve reached the point where debt collection is the only solution, we make it easy to proceed. You can export lists of customers to be sent for collection so the case can be handled correctly and with the necessary documentation.
Note: If you choose to use debt collection, it’s important that, in the business policy, invoices are not set to be credited automatically. The setting must be “Never — do not credit automatically.”
Do this by opening Financials in the left-hand menu > clicking the Invoices submenu.
In the View setting, select “Unpaid defaulted invoices.” Choose the desired business entityt and the period in which the invoices were issued. Make sure the statement date is set to today’s date; this is important to ensure that the right cases are sent to collections. Click show report; you can then export a list in the format required by your debt collections setup.
