Subscription accounting your finance team will trust

Subscriptions are awkward to account for. The cash arrives up front, the revenue belongs to issues that haven't been printed yet, the VAT depends on where the reader lives and whether they're reading on paper or a screen, and the corporate client wants their invoice in euros. Many publishers run a subscription system and a separate ledger, and spend the first week of every month reconciling the two.

Avio puts the ledger inside the subscription system. Orders, payments, deferred revenue and VAT come from the same records, so month-end starts from figures that already agree.

The sales ledger

Every customer has a multi-currency sales ledger. From it, your team can:

• match payments to invoices with a payment matching wizard: choose payments, match them, confirm;
• post cash, credits, refunds and write-offs;
• convert proformas to invoices;
• reprint documents;
• move items between accounts, for when a payment lands on the wrong customer.

A full month-end pack in one run

Pick the reports and the financial period, run it, and Avio produces the full set:

• deferred revenue summary and detail, including value per issue and revenue released this issue;
• debtors summary and detail;
• bank reconciliation, cash and refunds by product, and unallocated cash;
• VAT summary and detail.

Revenue can be smoothed evenly over the subscription term if that's how you recognise it. Every run is saved for audit, can be viewed on screen with every report a click away, and downloads as a single zip.

When the auditors ask what deferred revenue looked like at the end of March, you open the March run. No re-running, no "it's changed since then". If deferred revenue for subscriptions is new territory, our plain-English guide to deferred revenue for subscription publishers explains the basics.

A VAT rules engine, not a VAT spreadsheet

VAT on subscriptions changes with the customer, the country and the format. Avio applies it automatically from:

• the customer's VAT number;
• the invoice and delivery countries;
• EU or non-EU status;
• different rates for print and digital.

The rules are numbered and applied in order, with a country table showing EU status and print and digital rates. A built-in test tab lets you try a case before the rules go live, so a rate change doesn't go out untested.

Prices carry their own VAT-able percentage, which is how a bundle with print and digital parts gets taxed correctly. See orders and subscriptions for how prices and bundles are set up.

Multi-currency, properly

Prices are set per currency, an order can switch currency, and the ledger is multi-currency. Exchange rates are held with a dated history, so you can see which rate applied when.

Invoices and paying online

Invoices, receipts and credit notes are produced as PDFs. Each brand or company has its own invoice template, including bank payment slips in several currencies, so a group with several imprints sends out documents that look like each imprint.

Customers can pay an invoice by card on a customer-facing payment page. Fewer cheques to chase, and less time on the phone taking card details.

Other finance reports

• Cash report: payments and refunds for any date range, optionally by operator.
• Transaction report: current subscriptions, orders keyed or paid, expiries, credits, suspensions, unpaid orders and linked subscriptions, by product and date.

More on these on the reporting and BI page.

Controls finance will want

Removing invoiced orders needs its own permission, separate from removing free ones. Field-level changes to orders are recorded in the event log, and users and permissions can be exported for audit. See security and administration.

Is this you?

If you sell in several currencies, have print and digital at different VAT rates, or your finance team needs deferred revenue they can sign off, this is where Avio earns its keep. Finance-grade accounting is one of the main differences between Avio and Adeptis.

Book an Avio demo and bring your finance director. We'll run a month-end for them.

Questions

Next: Security and admin. Two-factor login, granular permissions, a full audit trail, a work queue and multi-brand configuration.