Account Management

An account is required for each customer holding a subscription to one or more titles. The account object holds general customer data, including name, address, VAT registration, and/or business registrations. It will always have a non-billable subscription and payment agreement assigned. The payment agreement can be used for payable subscriptions as well. 

No communication is sent to the customer directly from AMPS. All communications are via external solutions. AMPS events are available for consumption when an account is created, modified, suspended, anonymized, archived or if the permanent delivery address has changed on the account.

Accounts are tracked as either Consumer or Business Accounts.

A payment agreement is the agreement between the customer and client controlling financial aspects of the engagement and defines:

• the payment option the customer has selected for settlement of invoices and other charges
• the brand or title used in financial documents such as invoices, credit notes, dunning notices, etc. 
• the communication preferences of the customer with regards to financial documents
• the dunning terms assigned to follow-up on missing payments
• the communication with the customer on financial documents

A payment agreement is used to group subscriptions under a brand or title and manage the billing of one or more subscriptions. It comprises a billing group and a Dunning group. AMPS events are available for consumption when a payment agreement is created, modified or removed

• Billing Groups
  • Defines the brand/title used to brand financial documents such as invoices, credit notes, dunning notices, etc. 
  • Defines the customer selected payment option
    • supported payment options include Bank Transfer, Direct Debit, Credit Card, Mobile Payment, etc.  
    • selected among supported options for brand/title
    • together with term length the payment option defines the actual payment term/method assigned to the billing group
  • Defines the customer selected payment variant (e.g., Bank Transfer with Mail, Bank Transfer with e-mail, etc.). 
    • Used to manage variants of the same payment option (e.g., controlling whether surcharge is applied or not, or use of different due date calculations)
  • The payment option and variant controls:
    • the way Aria and AMPS managed payment gateways are used;
    • how financial documents are produced and/or distributed to external document management partners; and 
    • how under and overpayments inside or outside predefined thresholds are managed.
  • The payment option and variant supports use of both Aria and AMPS managed payment gateways
    • Aria-managed payment gateways include ADYEN, DIBS, etc. Gateways support both tokenized credit cards as well as credit card details stored in Aria
    • AMPS managed payment gateways include MOBILEPAY, SPID, etc. Gateways support tokenized credit cards or identifications only
  • Defines the customer selected delivery option for financial documents
    • Managed by the external partner handling distribution of financial documents
    • Examples are delivery by mail, delivery by email, delivery by email as HTML, delivery by email as PDF, etc. 
  • Each subscription is always assigned to a single billing group
• Dunning Groups
  • Defines the dunning process to be applied
    • The payment option and variant defined on the billing group also applies for the dunning group
    • Together with term length the payment option defines the actual dunning process assigned
  • The dunning process controls:
    • the steps dunning must go through if payment is not received in due time;
    • the fees to apply at each step, and how fees of previous steps are managed; and 
    • the production of a final invoice at time of suspension.
  • Each subscription is always assigned to a single dunning group