Auto Payments

With Auto Payments, we move from the account to the subscriber side of accounting. See introduction.

Auto renew subscribers have their subscription renewed automatically—from a bank account, a credit card, or a PayPal account—at the end of their renewal period. The subscription continues to be renewed until they inform the paper otherwise. Hence, a normal renewal notice is not sent to auto renew subscribers (though an auto renew notification can be sent—see Auto Notice Export). Auto renew subscribers have special auto renew terms which are set up by the newspaper. They are also assigned to auto renew billing groups. See Publication in the Setup Manual for more information.

The auto renew process is as follows:

1. During a new start, subscribers can be flagged as auto renew subscribers. They can also be transferred to auto renew status with a billing change. Bank account, credit card, or PayPal account information is entered for the customer at this time.

2. When you select this option, Auto Payments, Circulation automatically creates a suspended batch of credit card, bank draft, or PayPal payments for auto renew subscribers whose subscriptions will expire within a certain number of days (based on the auto renew terms). Auto renew information may also be exported to an ASCII file to produce statements.

3. You may print the Payment Journal to verify the payment entries included in this batch (see Payment Journal).

4. To restart the batch created in Auto Payments, select Batch Payment and enter the batch name (see Batch Payments). You can modify the auto renew payment entries before you Accept the batch. Once accepted, Circulation creates an ASCII file containing the auto renew information in your /dti/exchange/cm directory. Credit card auto renews can be in various formats, as governed by Business Rules. Bank draft auto renews can also be in various formats, as determined by bank setup.

5. Bank draft files are usually sent to the newspaper’s bank. The newspaper has to further prepare the credit card file for the various credit card companies (outside of Circulation).

6. When Payment Processing is run, the batch is processed and the auto renew subscriptions in the batch are renewed (i.e., the subscribers’ expire dates are extended). The auto renew transactions are looked upon as subscriber payments.

7. We recommend that you print the Payment Journal again to verify the auto renew transactions.

To create an auto renew batch:

1. Select Auto Payments from the Subscriber Payments menu to display the Automatic Subscription Payments window.

   
2. Click Add and complete the following fields.

   Field	Type	What to enter
   PRODUCT	setup	Enter the product for which to create automatic renewals. Enter “*” to multi-select products.
   RUN DATE	date	Enter the date for which to create this batch. Circulation will include credit card (or bank draft) auto renew subscribers whose expire date minus this date is less than or equal to the number specified in Auto Renew Terms setup.
   RENEWAL TYPE	predefined	Specify what kind of automatic renewals should be included in this batch: credit card, bank draft, prenotification, or PayPal. If you select prenotification, Circulation will pull all bank draft auto renew subscriptions that have started within the date range specified. A file named “notifyMMDDYY-nnn” (where “MMDDYY” represents the month, date and year of the export, respectively, and “nnn” represents an incrementing sequence number that distinguishes files exported on the same day) is created in /dti/exchange/cm listing the new auto renew subscriber information but with a zero amount. The Pre-Notification feature will do the verification in real-time through NavigaPay instead of transmitting the data to the bank. See Note below.
   BILLING GROUP	setup	If this batch is for bank draft or prenotification, enter the auto renew billing group to include, or enter “*” to multi-select groups. Only subscribers assigned to the billing groups selected can be auto renewed. See Publication in the Setup Manual for more information about auto renew billing groups.
   BANK	setup	If this batch is for bank drafts or prenotifications, enter the bank where auto renew money will be deposited into the newspaper’s account.
   SHORT DESCRIPTION	open (10)	If this is a bank draft or prenotification batch, enter some descriptive information (such as “Tribune”) for the subscriber’s bank statement.
   START DATE, END DATE	date	If this batch is for processing prenotifications, specify the date range during which new bank draft auto renew subscribers should be selected.
   INCLUDE PENDING RATE CHANGES	yes/no	If subscription-length pricing is being used, select this checkbox if you want pending rate changes to be considered when valuing subscription terms.
   AUTO ACCEPT BATCH	yes/no	Indicate if you want all open batches to be accepted automatically. Transaction Security controls whether the default answer can be changed.
   BATCH	open (10)	Assign a name to this batch of auto renews (this name will be used when the batch is restarted in payment entry).
   DESCRIPTION	open (30)	Enter a description of this batch.

3. Click OK and then Continue to process the auto renews. An Automatic Subscription Renewals report will be created, listing the number of subscriptions that were auto renewed and any errors that occurred in the process. Auto renew statements may also be exported (see below).

NavigaPay is a payment gateway wrapper that has been added for one-time and recurring payments. NavigaPay is an integrated payment hub for many vendors, such as Edgil Payway, Stripe, Braintree, etc. This feature has been added to the system to allow general request parameters to be sent to the selected payment vendor through the use of Naviga Pay.

Auto Renew Statements

Auto renew subscribers can be sent statements, similar to renewal notices, when their subscription automatically renews. To create the statement, auto renew information is automatically exported to an ASCII file when Auto Payments is run. The ASCII file can then be imported into word processing software to produce the actual statements.

The statement contains more detailed information than an auto renew notice (see Auto Notice Export), and is in a format similar to the Detailed Export 2 renewal notice format. A Business Rule in the Subscriber Payments section determines whether the export should contain credit card, bank draft, or all auto renew subscribers. Only subscribers who meet the following criteria will be exported:

• The subscription is being renewed by Auto Payments.

• The subscriber’s auto renew type (bank draft or credit card) is being exported, as governed by Business Rules.

• The Send Statement flag was set to “y” in the subscriber’s start or billing change.

The file will be exported to /dti/exchange/cm and be named autorenewsmmdd, where mm is the number of the month and dd is the day.