Re: Haworth consolidated invoice GGILLESP@UKANVM.BITNET 12 Apr 1991 23:18 UTC
In reply to Susan Davis's comment/inquiry re: vendors paying publishers late: About 2-3 years ago, one of our domestic vendors paid publishers late, and as can be imagined, problems caused by lapsed subscriptions lingered 6 mos. into the year with weeklies and dailies being the most problematic. It took the vendor a long time to admit that they hadn't paid the publishers on time. At first, we were told by our vendor account rep. that the publishers had applied the payments incorrectly, but several direct calls to (rather indignant) publishers gave us the true cause: they had not rec'd. payment from the vendor. (Altho the vendor would never admit it outright, I always wondered if it was a cash-flow problem: that the vendor didn't have enough cash on hand to pay for all customers' subscription renewals at the proscribed time, so they only paid for renewals on the portion of the customer base they *could* afford to pay at that time, leaving the rest to languish until the cash-flow situation improved.) The top managment at the vendor may have thought that their agency's image or reputation would suffer if their customers were told the truth. However, this particular vendor lost far more by not immediately levelling with us about their failure to pay for renewals on time -- they lost their credibility. This year, we, too have had trouble with some lapses in newspaper subscrip- tions. For a number of reasons germaine to our particular local situation, the bulk of our general collection newspapers are not checked in on-line, which IS unfortunate, because without the issue records (which are interactive with the claims system), not only are vital receipt data & publication patterns not re- corded online, but also claims cannot be generated automatically. Therefore, it takes us longer to realize that we have a major lapse in service rather than just a routine one. With the exception of the East German, Soviet, and Latin American newspapers (and a really convoluted problem with an Egyptian newspaper), most of the lapsed subs. for popular weeklies & newspapers that have been called to my attn. recently are with the same vendor that we had the trouble with 2-3 yrs. ago...Not an encouraging development. Susan, have you (and others on the discussion list) found that such lapses in subscriptions that you are experiencing are clustered primarily with one or two vendors, or are they more widely dispersed among all your vendor accounts? E. Gaele Gillespie / Asst. Head, Serials / Univ. of Kansas Libraries (913)864-3535 e-mail: GGILLESP@UKANVM 210 Watson / Lawrence, KS 66045