Refund Writeoff

A refund may be available to subscribers who are permanently stopped (the amount would be the remainder of their subscription). The subscribers, however, may never claim this refund, and after a certain number of days (defined in Business Rules) the publication can “write off” this refund. Business Rules determine how many days a refund may be kept available.

When you select this option, Circulation finds all refunds that can be written off, based on the number of days a subscriber refund should be maintained as available. For example, if the number of days is “180”, only refund amounts that have been maintained as available for longer than 180 days will be written off. A report will be created as part of the process, and refund writeoff information may be exported to an ASCII file in the /dti/exchange/cm directory (see Appendix B).

To write off refunds:

• Select Refund Writeoff from the Subscriber menu to display the Refund Writeoff Report window.

  
• Click Add and complete the following fields.

  Field	Type	What to enter
  PRODUCT	setup	Enter the product for which to write off available refund amounts.
  CUTOFF DATE	date	Enter the cutoff date for writing off refunds. Any available refund whose transaction date plus the writeoff days from Business Rules is on or before the cutoff date will be written off. For example, if the writeoff days is 30 and the available refund transaction date is September 15, the cutoff date must be on or after October 15 in order to write off the refund.
  ACTIVE SUBSCRIBERS	yes/no	Indicate whether refunds should be written off for active subscribers. If this checkbox is not selected, refunds will be written off only for inactive subscribers.
  RUN TYPE	predefined	Specify whether refunds for amounts over or under a certain amount should be written off, or both.
  ALL STATES STATE	yes/no setup	Select the state or states to include, or select All States.
  WRITEOFF LIMIT	decimal (10)	If Run Type is “over” or “under”, enter the refund amount limit here. For example, if RUN TYPE is “over” and Writeoff Limit is 20.00, only available refunds of over 20.00 will be written off. If a refund writeoff limit has been entered in Publication Setup (see Publication in the Setup Manual), it will be displayed here and cannot be changed.
  WRITEOFF	yes/no	Indicate whether to write off available refund amounts. Print the Refund Writeoff Report to review the items that will be written off before selecting this checkbox.
  G/L TRAN DATE	date	If transactions should be written off (i.e., WRITEOFF is selected), enter the general ledger date for these writeoff transactions.
  SOURCE	setup	Enter a source code for this writeoff, such as “accntg”.
  REASON	setup	Enter a reason code for this writeoff, such as “old”.
  EXPORT, FILE NAME	yes/no, open (15)	If refund writeoff information should be exported to an ASCII file, select Export and enter additional information in the Export Header Information panel. Then, in file name, enter the file name.

• Click OK and then Continue to proceed with the writeoff. As part of the writeoff process, the Refund Written Off report will be created, listing subscribers who have had available refunds written off. Once they have been written off, the “refund available” transactions change to “refund writeoff” (RefundWOFF) in the subscribers’ transaction history window.

Example—Refund Written Off Report