Reconciliations

In a stop press posted on connect today we are informed by The Advertiser that the deadline for all subscription customer reconciliations asked for back in December 2007 will need to be finalised by the end of October. Agents failing to submit the report will not be able to claim credits for errors past one month.

The point of the reconciliation was to credit agents for errors carried over from the disastrous NSS software upgrade in March 07. Agents at the time for a period where told even to ignore off notices. ANPL stood to owe Agents thousands for papers thrown away for up to nine months which we received no payment for, as the off notice either came through at a time when we told to ignore them, or the off notice did not come at all.

That we where unable to perform our own regular reconciles for many months exasperated the problem.

Most of us know the results. Credits where calculated then a whole heap of 'payments' discovered that where made to Agents for subscription customers who where off, which cancelled the credits out leaving many Agents with a supposed debt. The debt was magnanimously waived by ANPL.

As there are no actual credits to recoup I doubt that any Agent that hasn't submitted their reconcile by now is too worried about all the credits they may stand to lose.

Undercut on Good Food magazine

After coming back fresh from the ACP Connections conference and being told how important the Newsagency channel is to them, its disappointing to see magshop being able to sell a 12 month subscription of the new BBC Good Food magazine for just $39.95 with an additional free apron.

As somehow the 12 month subscription is only for 11 issues that makes it in total 89 cents under cost price(11x$4.95 being $54.45 and 75% of that being $40.84). I can't believe that they can be doing this without additional discounting from ACP.

How important are we meant to feel now?

Overdue customers - update

When submitting your list make sure you add in phone numbers to get your overdue customers removed from the telemarketing list. I only sent address and name and apparantly that is not enough info.

I've also been told we can expect further clarification to come regarding just how The Advertiser uses our data, what customers are eligible for subscription offers and what customers we need to inform them to remove from their lists.

Overdue agent collect customers and subscription offers

Everyone (in South Australia) should have seen the notice by now on Connect regarding agent collect customers directly being targeted by telemarketers. That in itself is a problem but additionally in the past it was enough for an agent to tell the Advertiser, once we received the on notice, that no this person has an overdue acount and should not receive the special. The main basis being that someone already late in their payments are even less likely to pay us once they start their account with another source.

The Advertiser has now determined that Agents need to advise them in advance of customers that are ineligible. Should agents fail to do so they will be obligated to deliver the subscription order. The deadline for the first lot of notifications is Friday August 1st.

Obviously only submitting one list is not the end of it on the agents side. This weeks good customer could be a bad one a few months down the track.

In order to save some telemarketing resources The Advertiser are again lumbering the agent with further administrative costs to secure basic control of our business.

Agents will now have to plan a schedule to keep The Advertiser up to date on overdue customers, simply so we can rule them out for subscription deals which undercut our prices and shrink our margins.

For NBS users whilst in the Home Delivery browser, going to task>customer reminders you can then produce a report based on your own parameters, either a set outstanding dollar value or days since last payment. This report should be good enough to give The Advertiser data this week before the deadline. On-going reporting is probably best done at account printing time, when in the summary report everyone with a brought forward balance should be deemed 'overdue'.