Cancelling Subscriptions and Membership

In some cases, a customer may want to cancel all or part of a subscription or membership (such as any issues remaining half way through the subscription). This topic describes the various methods for canceling subscriptions and membership dues.

This topic includes the following sub-topics:

• Canceling a Subscription or Membership Dues Order
• Marking a Subscription As Cancelled

Cancelling a Subscription or Membership Dues Order

If a customer wants to cancel a subscription or membership and receive a refund or credit for the remainder of the subscription that has not yet been fulfilled, an organization can create a cancellation order, either manually or using the Order Cancellation wizard. This is the same process for canceling any other type of shipped order in Aptify.

See Cancelling a Shipped Order for instructions.

However, when canceling a subscription or dues order, keep the following points in mind:

• If one or more issues of the subscription have already been fulfilled, you may need to create a partial cancellation (and a partial refund). To accomplish this, enter any partial term amount as a decimal value. To calculate this value, divide the number of issues being canceled by the total number of issues purchased for that term. For example, to cancel six issues of a 12-issue subscription, enter -.5.  To cancel five issues of a 12-issue subscription, enter -.4167.
  • For a manual order cancellation, you enter the quantity to cancel as a negative decimal value.
  • If using the Order Cancellation wizard, you can enter the quantity to cancel as a fraction or as a decimal (you also do not need to specify the negative sign).
  • See Best Practices for Partial Subscriptions for additional information on calculating a partial cancellation decimal amount.
• If canceling a bulk subscription (where two or more copies of each issue are sent to the recipient), all copies of a bulk subscription must be canceled at one time, regardless of whether the cancellation is performed manually or using the Order Cancellation Wwzard. To reduce the number of copies in a bulk subscription, cancel the original bulk subscription entirely and then create a new subscription for the desired number of subscription copies.
• If canceling a membership dues order, remember to modify the person's or company's membership type, membership status, and termination date on the appropriate Persons or Companies record to reflect this cancellation.
  • Aptify automatically updates the existing Termination Date for Persons linked to a specified Company when that Company's Termination Date is modified.
• If canceling a subscription that has a corresponding Standing Order for auto-renewal -purposes, Aptify automatically changes the Standing Order's Status to Inactive to prevent future automatic fulfillments.
• Since subscriptions and dues involve deferred income, when you create a cancellation order for all or part a subscription order, Aptify automatically generates a Scheduled Transaction Group when the cancellation order ships. When the group is expanded, each cancellation Scheduled Transactions record offsets a corresponding Scheduled Transactions record created for the initial subscription order.
  • For example, the figure is the original entry from the subscription purchase.

• Below figure is the record generated from the partial cancellation of the subscription. Note the offsets in the general ledger (GL) Account amounts.

• When you create a partial cancellation for a subscription, Aptify reduces the number of Issues Purchased on the Subscriptions and modifies the End Date of the subscription according. In the example below, the amount was reduced by 6 issues and by 6 months.

Marking a Subscription As Cancelled

Aptify strongly recommends that an organization cancel subscriptions by creating a cancellation order (as described in Cancelling a Subscription or Membership Dues Order). However, under some limited set of circumstances, an organization may choose to mark a Subscriptions record as Cancelled. This would temporarily or permanently disable additional fulfillments. For example, an organization might choose to cancel a customer's subscription if a customer is unreachable and items are repeatedly returned as undeliverable by the post office.

If necessary, you can follow these steps to mark a subscription as canceled:

1. Open the Subscriptions record.
2. Change the Status to Cancelled.
   • Note that you cannot manually specify a status of Expired. This can only happen when all of a subscription's issues have been sent. or the subscription has been canceled via a cancellation order (as described in Canceling a Subscription or Dues Order).
3. Click the Marketing tab.
   • When you change a subscription's status from Active to Cancelled, the Reason Cancelled field automatically updates from Not Cancelled to Other.
4. Select a cancellation reason from the Reason Cancelled drop-down list.
5. Enter additional information about this cancellation in the Cancel Comments field.
   
6. Click the Renewal Tab.
   • If canceling a subscription that has a corresponding Standing Order for auto-renewal purposes, click the Standing Order hyperlink to open the Standing Orders record that automatically renews this subscription.
   • Change the Standing Order's Status to Inactive to prevent future automatic fulfillments.
     
7. Save and close the Subscriptions record.
   • This subscription is excluded from any future fulfillments that it would otherwise qualify for.

If the organization decides to reinstate this subscription at a later date, do the following:

1. Open the record.
2. Change the Status back to Active.
3. Save and close the record.