Posted by In spite of the digital news content explosion, most Indians prefer to read morning news while sipping morning coffee or tea. But it is slowly shifting toward digital with millennials preferring digital content, However, close to 100 million newspapers from thousands of publications are distributed daily in India. Nearly 15,000 crores worth of billing happens annually, which are manual in nature and collected in cash. Although some subscribers have shifted to digital payments, but this segment remains unorganized and inefficient.
Right from publisher to dealer/distributor to vendors for final distribution, the whole system works seamlessly every day to deliver papers to doorsteps. Technology intervention is helping to make it efficient and particularly with automated billing and collection process for vendors. Gone are those days, where newspaper vendors would sit for 2-3 days preparing manual bill books trying to endlessly remember all changes and payment updates. On an average, a vendor used to take 4 to 5 weekends (10-12 days) for collection going door to door. Most of these vendors have second job, so time is precious.
In the last 4-5 years many newspaper vendors have started using technology for subscription billing, bookkeeping and digital payments. Billing and collection are the pain points to maintaining a healthy newspaper distribution service. Let us look at them in detail
Subscription Billing: Newspapers delivery in India works with subscription monthly subscription charges and in some cases with a one month advance. Billing is always post-paid and hence the collection is a pain for vendors to pay their distributors on time, to keep the regular circulation. While most newspaper vendors use flat charges for each newspaper subscription, which includes delivery charges on top of the actual price of the newspaper. Subscription billing gets complicated when subscribers take on specific days and sometimes vendors will customize the charges for specific customers. Indian subscribers read on an average 1.5 publications.
Collection: In many parts of India collection is still manual, where the vendor goes door to door for issuing the bill and collecting cash or alternate digital payments. Payment methods like Paytm, PhonePe, GooglePay are all P2P payment methods, not suited for businesses. They have to manually reconcile, by exchanging payment screenshots, which is inefficient.
To make the whole billing and collection procedure easier and error-free, there are many Billing & Collection apps are available in the market. All of them are made with the intention to make the users life easy. They all have different characteristics like with some you only can maintain online hisabkitab, with another you can maintain a collection records. But today we’ll be introducing you to Zopnote – Billing, Collection & Digital Khata App for Your Newspaper Business.
With Zopnote, not only you will be able to maintain bahikhata digitally, but also you can send payment reminders along with payment links with their preferred payment options to your customers. Not only this, you will be easily able to manage the subscriptions with ease without any error. With these added transparencies, your relationship with the consumer will get strengthened day by day.
To know more about Zopnote, you can visit Zopnote.com and to download the app from the Google Play Store, you can click here. Do you think we have missed any hurdle that you face and which should be mentioned here, please do comment and let us know your thoughts.
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