On the first working day of the month, someone in finance asks circulation for "the subscription numbers". What comes back is usually a few exports, a spreadsheet from last month with the dates changed, and a note saying the cash doesn't quite match yet.
A month-end pack fixes that. It's the same set of reports, run the same way every month, which finance and circulation both agree on before anyone starts on the management accounts.
This isn't accounting advice. Your accountants decide the policies. But the contents of a good pack are fairly standard, and most of the work is making sure the figures tie up with each other.
What the pack is for
The pack has three jobs. It gives finance the figures they need to close the month. It shows the business how the subscriber base moved. And it leaves a record you can open in a year's time, when the auditors ask what deferred revenue looked like at the end of March.
That last one is often forgotten. If your month-end figures can only be produced by re-running reports today, they'll come out different, because the data has changed since. A good pack is a saved snapshot, not a set of instructions.
1. Subscriber movements
Start with the people, not the money. For each title, and for each type of subscription (paid, trial, controlled free, corporate), show:
- live subscriptions at the start of the month;
- new subscriptions;
- renewals;
- lapses, where someone didn't renew;
- cancellations;
- suspensions and reinstatements;
- live subscriptions at the end of the month.
The start figure plus everything in, minus everything out, should equal the end figure. If it doesn't, something has been missed, and it's far better to find it here than in the accounts.
Keep lapses and cancellations separate. A lapse is a renewal you didn't win. A cancellation is someone choosing to leave partway through. They mean different things, and from 1 January the new consumer subscription rules add cooling-off and other cancellation rights for many auto-renewing consumer subscriptions. It's worth recording cancellations and refunds by reason now, so you can see the effect. Our guide to the 2027 subscription rules covers what's changing.
2. Deferred revenue
When readers pay upfront, the money isn't revenue until the issues go out. The pack should show deferred revenue by publication, in summary and in detail, with the revenue released this month or this issue.
The check finance will want is a roll-forward. Opening deferred revenue, plus new billings, minus revenue released, plus or minus refunds and adjustments, should give closing deferred revenue. We've written a plain-English guide to deferred revenue for subscription publishers if this is new territory.
3. Cash, refunds and Direct Debit
Show cash received in the month by product and by payment method: card, Direct Debit, bank transfer, cheque if you still get them. Alongside it, refunds by product.
Two lines deserve their own place in the pack:
- Failed Direct Debit collections, with what happened next. A failed collection that's quietly left alone is a subscriber who'll lapse without anyone deciding they should.
- Unallocated cash. Money in the bank that isn't matched to a customer or invoice. It should be small and it should be shrinking. If it isn't, someone needs time to clear it.
The cash figure should agree with the bank. Any difference should be explainable, usually timing.
4. Debtors
For B2B titles, corporate licences and agency orders often go out on invoice. The pack needs a debtors summary and an aged debtors list (current, 30, 60 and 90 days or more), so finance can chase and decide on any write-offs.
Include proformas raised but not yet paid or converted to invoices. They're easy to lose track of, and a renewal sitting on an unpaid proforma is really a renewal you haven't won yet.
The debtors total should agree with the sales ledger. If the subscription system and the ledger are separate, this is where the two most often disagree.
5. VAT
A VAT summary and detail, split the way your VAT return needs it: print and digital, UK and overseas, and any standard-rated parts of bundles. Our post on VAT on print, digital and bundled subscriptions covers the rules themselves.
How the figures travel matters too. Under Making Tax Digital, HMRC's VAT Notice 700/22 says it doesn't treat "copy and paste" as a digital link between software. A CSV export and import is accepted. So a VAT figure retyped from a subscription report into a spreadsheet is worth a conversation with your accountants.
6. A few numbers for the board
Finance packs aren't the place for every KPI, but a handful help: renewal rate by title, average price paid against list price, and the live subscription trend over 12 months. Measure renewals the same way every month, or the trend means nothing. Our guide to measuring renewal rates explains how.
The checks that make it trustworthy
A pack is only useful if people believe it. Before it goes out, run through these:
- Do subscriber movements reconcile, start to end, for every title?
- Does the deferred revenue roll-forward work?
- Does cash agree with the bank, apart from known timing differences?
- Does the debtors total agree with the ledger?
- Does the VAT summary agree with the detail?
- Do finance and circulation have the same live subscription count?
If any answer is "nearly", write down why. A one-line note now saves an afternoon in three months.
How long to keep it
Save each month's pack as it was run, with the date. Don't overwrite it.
HMRC says you must keep VAT records "for at least 6 years", or 10 years if you use the One Stop Shop scheme. Separately, the Companies Act 2006 requires accounting records to be kept for three years by a private company and six by a public one. Other rules can need longer, so check your own retention policy with your accountants.
Where we fit in
This is how the finance tools work in Avio, our subscription platform for larger publishers. You pick the reports and the financial period, and a full month-end pack runs in one go: deferred revenue summary and detail, debtors, bank reconciliation, cash and refunds by product, unallocated cash, and VAT summary and detail. Every run is saved for audit, can be viewed on screen, and downloads as a single zip.
Because the ledger sits inside the subscription system, the figures come from the same records customer service is looking at. That's most of the battle.
If you'd like to see a month-end run on realistic data, book a demo. Bring whoever does your month-end. They'll know exactly what to look for.
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.