ABC and BPA audit preparation, done by people who know what auditors ask

An ABC or BPA audit asks a simple question: can you prove the circulation figure you're selling to advertisers? Answering it is less simple. The auditor wants to see where each reader came from, when they asked for the magazine or paid for it, that their details are current, and that nobody has been counted twice.

If your data has grown up over years in spreadsheets and old systems, getting it into that shape can take your team weeks. That's the work we take on. Our ABC audit preparation starts long before the auditor's visit, and it's what we've been doing for publishers for decades.

What an auditor actually looks for

Every audit is different in the detail, but the questions are familiar:

• Source. Where did each reader come from, and can you show it? A request form, an online order, a renewal, a phone call logged at the time.
• Date. When did they last ask for the magazine, pay for it, or confirm their details? For controlled circulation, how recent is their qualification?
• Eligibility. Do their job title, company and other answers meet your published terms of control?
• Payment. For paid copies, is there a payment record that matches the subscription and the price?
• Distribution. Was a copy actually sent to them for each issue, and what happened to copies that came back?
• Duplicates. Is anybody counted twice under slightly different names or addresses?

If the records answer those questions, the audit is mostly a matter of showing them. If they don't, there's work to do first.

How we prepare your audit

Simon Torrington, our Data & Audit Specialist, leads the work. He's spent years on circulation audits and writes the SQL that pulls your records apart and puts them back together properly.

1. Review the data. We load your subscriber file (from our own system or an export from yours) and check it against your terms of control or subscription terms. You get a plain summary of what's in good shape and what isn't.
2. Clean it. Duplicates are found and merged, addresses are checked, incomplete records are flagged, and job titles and business types are coded consistently. Every change is logged, so the trail survives the clean-up.
3. Fill the gaps. Where qualification has gone stale or evidence is missing, we run requalification by email, post or phone, and record the answers with their date and source.
4. Produce the figures. We calculate the circulation for the audit period, broken down the way the audit body needs: by type, by source, by how recently readers were qualified, and by geography.
5. Assemble the evidence. Sample records, request forms, payment records, mailing files and gone-away logs, organised so the auditor can follow any figure back to the people behind it.
6. Support the audit. We answer the auditor's questions alongside you and pull extra records when they ask for them.

The figures in a form you can read

The Circulation Age report in Adeptis takes one best record per reader per title, counts them by ABC priority tier and breaks them down by request type and how long ago they asked for the magazine. That's usually the first thing we look at with a new client. It shows straight away whether requalification is on track or quietly falling behind. Alongside it we look at demographics, source and the gone-away record, all of which feed the audit return.

For larger publishers on Avio, the same discipline runs through orders and subscriptions, including controlled circulation, and data quality scans that find duplicates and gaps before an auditor does.

Year-round, not just audit season

The easiest audit is the one where the records were kept properly all year. If we run your subscriptions and circulation, audit-ready records come as part of the service: every order, request, payment, address change and gone-away is logged as it happens, and requalification runs on a schedule rather than in a panic.

If you run your own subscriptions, we can still help between audits with periodic data checks, requalification campaigns and a mock count, so there are no surprises when the real one starts.

Clean data is better data for everything else

The work pays off beyond the audit. A clean file means less money spent posting magazines to people who've left, more accurate selections for marketing, and figures you can quote with confidence in your media pack. Our post on media pack figures advertisers trust goes into why that matters when you're selling space.

GDPR as part of the job

Audit work means handling a lot of personal data. We do it as your data processor under a written agreement, in our own secure systems with two-factor sign-in, role-based permissions and an audit log. We keep the work inside those systems wherever we can.

Who you'll work with

Simon does the heavy lifting on the data. Julie Sherwood, our Circulation & Marketing Specialist (formerly at Wilmington, VNU, Datateam and Quantum Publishing), runs requalification campaigns and knows how to get readers to reply. Rob Sherwood, who founded Adept after years at WDIS, Optima and CDS Global, has worked through plenty of audits. Meet the team, or talk to us about your next one.

Questions