Managing Contacts in Payreq Delivery

Responsibility for managing Contacts

Contacts can only be managed by users who have the appropriate permissions in Payreq Delivery.

Depending on your organisation's setup, Contacts can be managed by:

• Authorised users within your organisation
• A mailhouse or print service provider acting on your behalf
• An automated integration from your billing or source system

If you cannot see the Contacts tab or cannot add, edit or import Contacts, contact your organisation's Payreq Delivery administrator.

Frequency of Contact updates

Contacts should be updated whenever a document is issued for that account, regardless of whether it is being delivered digitally or printed & posted. This ensures that the Contact information is current should the recipient of a physical notice wish to subscribe for digital delivery.

Contacts can also be updated any time outside of scheduled billing or payroll runs. Updating Contacts more frequently, especially for accounts issued quarterly, can make it easier to manage any Subscriptions that are flagged Deregister? for review.

The Deregister? status in Payreq Delivery is used to identify when there's a name mismatch between the name supplied in Contact data and the name recorded on a subscription. This is most common when the Contact ID is preserved across recipients. Name mismatches in this context are often due to property ownership changes or data updates.

This status is triggered when:

• The name on the Contact record changes (e.g. due to a property sale, title transfer, or name correction).
• The system detects that the subscription no longer matches the contact data it was originally linked to.

How Contacts are updated

Contacts can be added or updated in several ways:

• In the Payreq Delivery console
• Via SFTP
• Via the Payreq API

The best method depends on how your organisation manages customer data. Manual and CSV updates in the console are usually suitable for one-off or smaller bulk updates. SFTP and API updates are generally best to ensure Contact data is maintained automatically without relying on file manipulation.

Duplicate Contact IDs

Each Contact ID must be unique within your Contacts list, and each Contacts update must contain each Contact ID only once. This applies to every update method, and to both add and replace updates.

If the same Contact ID appears more than once in an update, the whole update fails and none of it is processed. Your existing Contacts stay as they were. Where you see the error depends on how you send the update:

The error name duplicate-biller-account-number is a technical term. The account number it refers to is the Contact ID.

To fix the problem, find the repeated Contact ID in your source data, keep one record for it, and send the corrected update again. For method-specific steps, see Updating Contacts in the Payreq console, Updating Contacts via SFTP and Updating Contacts via API.

Good Contact management practices

To keep Contacts accurate and reduce subscription or delivery issues:

• Keep Contact data consistent with your billing or source system
• Make sure each Contact ID appears only once in your Contacts list and in each update
• Investigate subscriptions that appear in the Deregister? view
• Confirm that automated Contact files are being supplied and processed as expected

Clean and consistent Contact data helps Payreq Delivery match customers correctly and deliver documents with confidence.

For more information, see How Contact changes affect Subscriptions.