Addresses

The InfoSystems suite is designed as an enconomy system for subscription products with physical delivery and/or physical related payments (i.e. invoices delivered by mail). The effect is that address is an important part of a customer (and furthermore on a subscriber), and thus it has always been a requirement that a customer must have an address.

In addition companies distributing (the distributors) the physical products have requirements for spelling of street names and placement of house number, entrance, floor etc. on address labels. For that reason an address in the does not only have to exist, it also has to match the "street/road" register in the system such that it can be matched with the right distributor version of said address.

The way these requirements are implemented has two major consequences when creating customers (and subscribers)

1. Customers should always have an address

2. The given address must be supplied in a form that allows it to be matched to the distributors definition of the address.

The system supplies a set of mechanisms to translate abbreviations and common spelling variations, but these mappings have to be managed and are not always present or does not always represent the customers actual uses.

Address as part of the subscribers economy

For subscribers, the delivery to the address is part of the agreement between customer and publisher. Some areas might incur a different cost than others (for instance if delivering the paper abroad), so a change of address means there might be a change of cost for the total subscription.

For that reason address changes needs to be scheduled for a specific date so the economy can be adjusted for that date.

Likewise the distributors needs to be informed about the change before some specific time for the change to have an effect. There is after all a physical paper/product that needs to be manufactured and delivered to that location. Most distributors nowadays just needs it on the afternoon before the product is delivered, but it still varies from distributor to distributor.

Note
These reasons are why the concept of a Distribution Date exists when managing subscriptions.

Traditionally this concept of a date has been exposed to the end user, forcing him/her to decide "from which time" should the change of address take effect. The unfortunate side effect is that changing address is not just a matter of changing an address on the customer/subscriber, but instead a matter of scheduling an address change. The nice side-effect of this is that its possible to schedule address changes in advance once you know they occur (for instance when you plan to move to a new location and now you are going to be at the new address on the 10th of the next month or some such).

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