If there is a need for someone other than the subscriber to pay the invoice, Iteras offers several ways to achieve this: group subscriptions or debtors.
A debtor is an ordinary subscriber (Iteras does not have special debtor types) who pays for another subscriber’s subscription. For this to be possible, a relational custom field must be set up on the product, allowing you to select another subscriber as the payer on the subscription. This can be used when there is a simple need to have someone else pay for a subscription.
In a group subscription, on the other hand, you select another subscription as the payer. This subscription will typically (but not necessarily) belong to another subscriber, who will then receive the invoice.
Group subscriptions offer significantly more advanced functionality than the debtor functionality:
The subscriber with the payer subscription can, in self-service, manage the recipient subscriptions associated with the subscription – i.e., add new ones, cancel, or change subscriptions for the recipients. There is also the option for the payer subscription holder to import an Excel file with a larger list of recipients.
Group subscriptions can include a tiered pricing model with an unlimited number of intervals, so that the price adjusts according to the number of recipients on the group subscription.
Group subscriptions can have a limit on the number of recipients in the subscription (most relevant if there is a fixed price regardless of the number of recipients).
Group subscriptions have synchronized billing for all recipients. New recipients added during a period are billed proportionally for the remainder of the current period.
The disadvantage of group subscriptions is that they are a bit more complex to set up, as you first need to create a payer subscription and then link a recipient subscription, whereas a simple debtor does not require creating a payer subscription first - it is sufficient that the debtor is created. There does not even need to be any kind of subscription for the debtor.
Note that you can also simply enter a different billing address directly on the subscriber account. This is the easiest way to do it, for example, when a mother or father pays for an out-of-home daughter’s or son’s subscription, or the other way around.