Jiwa

have a scenario for a potential new client that I can't quite figure out.

(simplified for clarity)

This business is selling a 6 month subscription to a magazine. They want to generate a sales order and invoice the customer up front and then deliver the product one magazine per month over 6 months.

Each month, they will run a process where they will identify the active subscribers and print the labels for the magazine mailout.

what's the best way of doing this ?

/Ryan

pricerc wrote:have a scenario for a potential new client that I can't quite figure out.

(simplified for clarity)

This business is selling a 6 month subscription to a magazine. They want to generate a sales order and invoice the customer up front and then deliver the product one magazine per month over 6 months.

Each month, they will run a process where they will identify the active subscribers and print the labels for the magazine mailout.

what's the best way of doing this ?

/Ryan

There's a variety of ways you could do this. You could even do it using a Word mail merge. Word has automation capabilities so you could query the database from within Word to get the list of fields (subscriber name, address, etc) and then print the template label.

You could also do a scheduled script, which prints a crystal report representing the label.

You could do a batch print for sales orders with a custom batch print filter and a custom report acting as the "invoice" but printing a label.

Mike,

To be honest, I hadn't even started thinking about the printing process, I'm still trying to figure out the best way to enter the orders in the first place?

We've considered a couple of options, but thought we'd ask the experts first

So far we've thought of:

1) treat a subscription as an order for multiple units of a single item (so a 12 month subscription would be a qty ordered of 12), and process the order. We would then use custom fields to track how much has actually been 'dispatched', and possibly when last something was sent.

2) setup each subscription as a 'kit', so a 6 month subscription would be a part with 6 components, a 12 month subscription a part with 12 components, etc. When adding the subscription to the order, it would then populate with all the components, the idea being that we would then ship them one line at a time (can you do this?).

3) there was a third one.... but I can't remember what it was now... something to do with creating batches within inventory.

From a financials point-of-view, the client will receive payment for the subscription right up front, but then have a liability for any magazines not yet sent out, and they would like to be able to track that.

tia,
/Ryan