Placing an Order for a Subscription Product

Follow these steps to place an order for a subscription product:

1. Open a new record from the Orders service.
2. Enter Ship To and Bill To information on the Customer tab.
   • This topic provides only an overview of the order entry process. It is intended to focus on how ordering a subscription product differs from ordering a basic product. See Entering Customer and Order Information for complete information on how to specify customer information on an order.
     
     
3. In the Lines area of the Orders form, enter the subscription product in the Find Product field.
4. Enter the Quantity to order.
   • For a subscription product, a quantity of 1 corresponds to a one-year subscription duration. Therefore, you can increase the quantity to specify a multi-year subscription (for example, a quantity of 3 would create a 3-year subscription).
   • There may be situations where an organization would prefer to calculate a multi-year subscription based on multiple order lines. For example, when offering succeeding years of a subscription at a discounted rate. Therefore, you can also add multiple order lines for multi-year subscriptions. For example, if you add two of the same order lines, for the same recipient with a quantity of one, the system creates a 24-issue, two-year subscription. In some cases, you may want to specify a decimal quantity. For example, if the organization allows partial year subscriptions, you could enter .5 for a 6-month subscription. See Best Practices for Partial Subscriptions for more information on working with partial subscriptions.
     
     
5. Click Add to add an order line for the subscription product.
   • This is the minimum steps required to add a subscription product to an order. The subscription's subscriber is the order's Bill To person and the subscription's recipient is the order's Ship To person.
   • You can specify additional settings on the subscription's Order Lines record, as described below (but this step is not required).
     
     
6. Depending on how the subscription product is configured, if the customer has a previous subscription for the same product that has expired, a dialog may display alerting a user to modified the Subscription Start Date as necessary based on your organization's business practices. Click Yes to continue the subscription from the original end date. Click No to restart the subscription based on the subscription's renewal and prorating behavior settings.
   • See Step 9 below for more information about the Subscription Start Date setting.
   • See Creating Subscription Products for more information about configuring a subscription renewal behavior.
     
     
7. If needed, double-click in the gray area to the far left of the order line to open its Order Lines record.
8. Click the Subscriptions tab.
   
   
   
   
9. Configure the following settings, as needed:
   
   • In Memory Of: If this subscription is in memory of a particular person, specify that person in this field, which links to the Persons service.
   • In Honor Of: If this subscription is in honor of a particular person, specify that person in this field, which links to the Persons service.
   • Recipient: By default, the Ship To person on the order appears in this field. If you want to specify a different recipient for the subscription, clear this field and enter another person. This field links to the Persons service.
   • Recipient Company: When the purchase type is set to Company, the Recipient Company is specified in this field. If you want to specify a different recipient company for the subscription clear this field and enter another company. This field links to the Company service.Purchase Type: By default, a subscription's purchase type is Individual. To specify that this subscription applies to a company instead, change the Purchase Type to Company.
     • An administrator can modify the default purchase type, if necessary. See the About Orders Entity Attributes for details.When the purchase type is set to Company, the membership due's (or subscription's) Subscriber Company is the Ship To company specified on the order. Note that this is the default behavior for Aptify. If applicable, an administrator can modify this behavior so that the system populates the Subscriber Company using the company linked to the Order line's Recipient (which typically corresponds to the Order's Ship To Person). See Note Concerning Company Subscriptions and Dues for details.
        
     Subscription Copies: If the customer is ordering multiple copies of the same publication (for example, a company wants to receive 2 copies of every issue), enter the number of copies in this field.
     • A subscription for more than one copy is known as a Bulk Subscription.
     • When you click OK to return to the main order, Aptify automatically updates the Extended Price of the order line based on the number of copies ordered. For example, if ordering 2 copies of a 1-year $300 subscription, the Extended price is multiplied by 2 to $600 on the order line (even though the Quantity is displayed as 1).
        

   • Subscription Start Date: By default, Aptify determines the start date for the subscription based on the subscription product's Start Date, Turnover Date, and any current subscription
     the customer has to the same product. If none of these settings is applicable, Aptify enters today's date in the Subscription Start Date field. You can modify the start date as necessary.

     Note Concerning Multiple Subscriptions

     If there are multiple subscriptions for the same recipient and same product, Aptify returns the subscription with the most recent End Date.

   1. • Agent Order Number: If this subscription was placed through a third-party agency, you can specify the original order number for the agent in this field.
      • Auto Renew: Select Auto Renew to create a standing order that automatically renews this subscription. See Auto-Renewing Subscriptions for more information
        
        
10. Specify any additional information on the other tabs of the Order Lines form.
    • See Specifying Order Line Details for information on the Order Lines form and the configuration options that are common to all products. This topic only describes the configuration options that are specific to subscriptions.
      
      
11. Click OK to save and close the Order Lines form.
12. Continue processing the order as necessary.
    • See Taking Orders for details.
       
13. Ship the order.

• • See Shipping Orders and Placing Back Orders for details.
  • In addition to the standard shipping behavior, Aptify performs the following tasks when an order contains one or more subscription products:
    • Aptify creates a Subscriptions record for each subscription. See the sub-topics in Managing Subscriptions and About the Subscriptions Form for more information on working with Subscriptions records.
    • Aptify generates a Scheduled Transaction Group to recognize deferred income over the duration of the subscription. A user later expands each Scheduled Transaction Group into a set of Scheduled Transactions. See About Scheduled Transactions and GL Accounts for information about Scheduled Transaction Groups and Scheduled Transactions.
    • If the Auto-Renew option was selected for a subscription, Aptify creates a Standing Orders record. See Auto-Renewing Subscriptions for more information.