News
New General Ledger Feature Designed to Improve Subscription Management and Accounting
February 17, 2022
Multipub has been recognized for years for its subscription management and accounting capabilities. As we add new features to our system, our development team is continually exploring how to improve the user experience for those in accounting departments. One of our recent changes allows accountants to see the full life cycle of an order over a subscription period and view earned and deferred revenue.
While viewing a subscriber record in Subscriber Inquiry, Multipub users can now see all General Ledger entries for an order. This is particularly valuable to publishers that closely monitor the revenue recognition for each subscriber or each product. Using it, they can easily see when revenue was earned for each order.
How the New General Ledger Feature Works
As Multipub users are performing their fulfillment and customer service responsibilities, our platform is working behind the scenes to automatically track accounting tasks. It does this by creating journal entries as each item is completed. For example, a new order that hasn’t served any content yet will post the entire sales amount as a debit to the deferred income account. As content is served, either daily for electronic / web-based products or per issue for print products, revenue is earned by posting a credit to the earned income and a debit to the defered income accounts.
Using the new General Ledger tool, you can see a variety of datapoints for every subscriber. Some of these include:
- The order date.
- The General Ledger account numbers.
- The Accounting description.
- The amount of the journal entry.
- The Product Code associated with the journal entry.
- Subscriber number.
- Order number.
Then, as you click on individual orders, you will see journal entries for each one.
How to Access the New General Ledger Feature
In the past, these logs could only be accessed from the accounting portion of our subscription management system. But now, you can use this method to unlock insights into your revenue streams.
- To access it, start by viewing the Inquiry screen.
- There, you’ll find a new tab labeled “Distribution.”
- Once selected, you can see all General Ledger distributions there.
Ready to learn more about our subscription management and accounting capabilities? Visit this site to schedule a demo.