If you want to know what Avio is and what it does, start with What is Avio?. This piece is the other half: what actually happens when a publisher moves onto it.
I'm not going to give you a timeline. It depends on how many titles you have, how tidy your data is and how many surprises are hiding in the old system (there are always a few). But the steps are much the same every time.
1. Look hard at what you've got
Before anything moves, it pays to know what's in the current system. How many live subscriptions per title? How many duplicates? How many records with no postcode, a dodgy email address or a gone-away flag nobody has looked at since 2019?
This isn't box-ticking. Whatever you migrate, you'll be living with. Cleaning up before the move is cheaper than cleaning up after it, and it gives you a set of numbers to check against once the data is in.
2. Write down how you really work
Not how the procedures manual says you work. How you actually do it.
That means paid, trial and controlled circulation orders, corporate licences, bundles, renewals, refunds, missed copies and month-end. It also means the odd one-off arrangements that live in one person's head. Those are the ones that bite later.
3. Set Avio up to match the business
Avio is configured rather than custom-built, so this is where your business gets described to the system:
- brands, companies, products and product families;
- prices per currency, flagged as print, digital or both, plus bundle prices with the revenue split across the titles inside them;
- circulation status codes, subscription types, sales channels and campaign codes;
- the demographic and qualification questions you ask readers;
- issue schedules per title;
- VAT rules, which come with a built-in test tool so each rule can be proved before it goes live.
The security and administration side gets set up here too: who can see what, who can refund, and two-factor login.
4. Migrate, then check
The data comes across: contacts, addresses, orders, payments, preferences and history. Then comes the important part. Checking it.
Counts per title should match what you had. Live subscriptions should expire when they did before. Controlled circulation readers should keep their request details, because your auditor will want them. Avio's data quality scans and side-by-side merge are useful here for catching anything the old system let through.
5. Prove the money
Finance people rightly want to see that the numbers agree before they trust a new system. Run the month-end pack for a period you've already closed in the old system and compare. Deferred revenue, debtors, cash and VAT should all line up, or you should be able to explain exactly why they don't.
If something doesn't reconcile, far better to find it now than at the year-end audit.
6. Set up renewals and fulfilment
Each product gets its own renewal series, with intervals set per title. Renewal batches are tracked from open to despatched to closed, and each one can be exported for your mailing house. The first live issue run and the first renewal batch deserve a careful look before they go out. For ideas on the series itself, see building a renewal series that works.
7. Connect the other systems
Most publishers have a paywall, a payment gateway, an email platform and a mailing house to keep in step. We've connected Avio to all of those kinds of systems before. The API is read-only, with scoped, rate-limited and logged keys, and saved selections can be exported as CSV for anything else.
8. Train the team
Customer service, circulation, marketing and finance all use Avio differently. Train each group on what they'll actually do day to day, rather than a two-hour tour of every screen. The work queue helps here too, because everyone can see what's open and who it's waiting on.
9. Go live, then keep tuning
Go-live isn't the finish line. Once the dashboards and reports are running on real data, you'll spot things you want to change. Because our development team is in-house, those changes tend to ship in days rather than months.
Who does what
We do the heavy lifting on migration, configuration and integrations, and we train your team. You know your titles, your readers and your quirks, so we'll lean on you for those. If you'd rather hand over the day-to-day processing as well, our circulation and subscriptions bureau can run it for you.
Not sure Avio is the right size for you? Have a look at Avio or Adeptis. Otherwise, book an Avio demo and we'll walk you through it with your own situation in mind.
Rob Sherwood is Managing Director of Adept Data Services. He has spent his career in subscriptions and circulation, at WDIS, Optima and CDS Global before founding Adept.