4% Allowance

The Alliance for Audited Media has certain rules regarding office paid subscriptions. One of these is the “4% rule”, which states that no more than four percent of a newspaper’s net office pay draw can be made up of unpaid papers (i.e., grace papers that were not paid for and therefore were written off). The 4% Allowance Report calculates the percentage of office pay draw that was written off within a certain date range.

The report can list individual subscriber detail, and contains subtotals by AAM zone. The report can be run to include or not include “excluded” subscriptions—written off subscriptions that had more than the allowable number of grace days or a particular stop reason code (as entered at run time).

The 4% calculation is:

copies written off / (total office pay copies - copies written off - excluded copies)

Note that “copies written off” does not include excluded copies, although they also were written off.

To run this report:

• Select 4% Allowance from the AAM menu to display the 4% Allowance Report window.

  
• Click Add and complete the following fields.

  Field	Type	What to enter
  PRODUCT	setup	Specify the publication to include in the report, or enter “*” to multi-select.
  WRITEOFF TYPE	predefined	Indicate whether the report should consider grace written off by Customer Service or the general ledger (it is possible to write grace off for the GL yet retain grace in Customer Service).
  START DATE, END DATE	date	Enter the date range of the report. Only grace written off between these dates will be considered, and the total office pay draw for these dates will be used in the four percent calculation.
  BREAK OUT DAYS	yes/no	Days of the week can be reported separately on AAM reports. For example, Monday - Thursday may be reported as one group, Friday and Saturday as another, and Sunday as a third. Indicate whether this report should separate draw by the day groupings, as defined in Business Rules (AAM section).
  GRACE DAY LIMIT	integer (3)	Specify the number of grace days that must be written off for in order to consider the subscription “excluded” from the four percent rule. The default is 90 days. Note that this is cumulative grace days; so, for example, if the limit is 90 days and a subscriber had 60 grace days written off, and then 40 grace days were written off three months later, and both writeoffs were within the report date range, the total grace days for the subscriber would be 100, exceeding the limit.
  STOP REASONS	setup	Subscribers with grace written off can be considered excluded based on the reason code of the stop that created their grace owed (grace owed are created when a subscription expire-stops at the end of the grace period). Enter or multi-select the stop reason codes that should be used to determine excluded subscriptions. For example, you may want to exclude subscribers who stopped with a “Did not order” reason code. Note that if the subscriber’s grace days exceed the limit above, they will be excluded regardless of the stop reason code. Also note that subscribers with selected stop reason codes that have no grace written off will not be excluded. If no stop reasons should be selected, leave this field blank.
  REPORT TYPE	predefined	Indicate whether the detail or summary version of the report should be generated. The detail version lists individual subscribers and the grace amounts written off; the summary version will contain only totals at the AAM and publication level.
  SHOW EXCLUDED	yes/no	If the report is being run in detail mode, indicate whether excluded subscriptions should appear on the report. Excluded copies will be subtracted from the gross office pay draw regardless.
  CREATE EXPORT	yes/no	Indicate whether the report information should be exported. If so, the file will be exported to the /dti/exchange/cm directory. The export format is shown in Appendix B in the User Manual.
  FILE NAME	open (30)	If Create Export is selected, enter the export file name.

• Click OK and then Continue to generate the report and export.

Example—4% Allowance Report