Update News for October 2014

Here is a quick run-down on what you will find in this bulletin:

• • Term4Sale Listings For 2015

     

     

  • Term4Sale – Agent Editon
    Price Increase 

     

  • Through The Anti-Virus Hurdles

     

     

  • The On-Line Payment Option Works Great

     

     

  • ROP Factors Next For Conversion

     

     

These topics will be dealt with in more detail throughout this bulletin.

Term4Sale Listings For 2015Last month’s bulletin talked about the Term4Sale pricing strategy for 2015. It did not meet with the resistance or complaints that we had encountered from the previous June 2014 announcement.

To review the changes:

• 1. Personal Use Subscribers will receive 3 free listings in 2015.NOTE: If you only have two free listings,you must ask for the 3rd listing, we will not be chasing you for it. The free listing will come on a first come, first served basis. The earliest you can ask for your 3rd free listing, to reserve your space, is November 1st.

     Request for the third free zip code must be by email. If you send an email, requesting a particular zip code as your free zip code, prior to November 1st, it will be ignored/deleted.

     We will be invoicing term4sale renewals in the middle of November, as we do each year. If you ask for a third free listing after that point, you will have to choose from one that is available.

     IMPORTANT: Between November 1st and November 15th, your third free listing can bump a paid listing.

     If you are a personal user and have been buying zip codes, and you don’t specify which listing is your free listing, we will simply pick one of your paid listings and make it a free listing at your renewal.

     EXAMPLE: Let’s assume you are buying 10 zip codes in addition to your home and free zip code. If you don’t act to specify which zip code is your free zip code, we will simply pick one of the 10 and invoice you the other 9.

  2. Trial subscribers, who can obtain Compulife for 4 months FREE, can no longer use their 3 zip code listing to bump existing subscribers who have paid listings. Bumping can ONLY occur after they have paid for the software.
  3. For most subscribers who buy zip codes listings, there is no change to term4sale listing prices. Changes to prices ONLY affect those who buy more than 100 zip codes.
  4. The maximum zip codes ANY subscriber can have for 2015 is 400.
  5. Only subscribers with the Standard License ($299 versus $199) can buy more than 100 zip codes.
  6. Current personal use subscribers do not face the higher priced software until their first renewal of the software.
  7. Personal use subscribers who want to buy more than 100 zip codes, have until November 15th to lock in an extended personal use subscription.Example: You can add another 3 years to your current personal use subscription by paying $449. That would add 3 years to your current personal use subscription, and allow you to buy up to 400 zip codes without facing the standard license price until your extended subscription ran out.
  8. Any subscriber buying more than 100 zip codes, will pay an addition 25 cents per month ($3 per year) for each zip code over 100 purchased zip codes. It will be added as a surcharge to your invoice.

You can learn more about this at: Understanding How Agents Are Listed

Term4Sale – Agent Editon
Price IncreaseWe have increased the “term only” edition of Compulife from $69 to $99. There are less than 100 customers for this version of Compulife and we debated canceling that product. After further consideration we decided it would still be nice to have an entry level version of our software for those who think $199 is just to high a price to pay for independent, competitive intelligence about the term life insurance market.

The “Term4Sale – Agent Edition” is different from the personal use edition of Compulife in the following ways:

* * * Term4Sale – Agent Edition * * *The price of the Term4Sale – Agent Edition can be reduced by $10 if the buyer does not want a zip code listing at www.term4sale.com. On the flip side, we will now allow a Term4Sale – Agent Edition subscriber to purchase up to two additional zip codes, for $15 per year per zip code. Previously you received only one free zip code listing and could not buy any additional zip code listings.

Through The Anti-Virus HurdlesWe think all the nagging in our monthly and midmonth bulletins paid off, and most subscribers have now gotten through the problem of our new CQSDOWN.EXE setting off their anti-virus software. Hopefully we won’t have any more changes to that program for some time, and most of the anti-virus products will recognize it as acceptable software.

As we have said before, the anti-virus products are a real headache for smaller, niche market software companies as many anti-virus products now treat software as “guilty” until proven innocent.

The On-Line Payment Option Works GreatIt has been fun to watch credit card payments come in, at all hours of the day, as subscribers take advantage of the option to pay for their Compulife directly on-line. And it appears the new system is working without any problems.

IMPORTANT: Compulife does not get, and does not keep, your credit card information on file. No one can raid our sites or servers and steal your information from Compulife – WE DON’T HAVE IT!

The biggest trick is that when you get the online invoice, attached as a PDF file to an email, you have to click on the payment button in that invoice which takes you to the web version of that same invoice. You must then click the payment button again on the web version of invoice. The second click takes you to where you can make the payment, on the banking website.

The reason that there are two invoices is because the Windows program can also link to your invoice on-line, and so it is possible, if you don’t have the email copy of the invoice, to get to the web based invoice from your software. Those agents, who leave it to the last minute to pay, usually go into a full fledged panic when they go past the end of the subscription and their software no longer works. They usually are desperate to revive their subscription, and it rarely happens during business hours. Now you can pay whenever you want.

NOTE: While we can now receive payments 24 hours a day, that doesn’t mean our staff can process the renewal 24 hours a day. Once we receive an email from the bank (usually within minutes) confirming receipt of the payment, we then have to process that into our subscriber database and that remains a manual operation. Incidentally, we have no intention of automating that part of the process, for a host of reasons. Anyway, on the first regular working day after we receive your payment (which can be the same day if you made the payment early enough), we will process that payment and update your subscription files on our server. At that point your software will pick up the new subscription information and carry on.

The best way to ensure there is no interruption in service, is to not leave the payment until the last minute.

We will continue to mail paper invoices for a while, until we are satisfied that no one is having problems with the new procedures. Jeremiah has decided that we will go through a transition where we send the email versions of the invoices a week before we mail the invoice, and we can then hold back the mail version of the invoice for those who have paid promptly.

Eventually the mailing of invoices will end completely, and the only way you can get your renewal invoice is either by email or through our software itself.

Unpaid invoice statements, where applicable, will continue to be mailed.

I always am reluctant to use development resources to improve administration processes, simply as it’s time not used to advance the functionality of the comparison software itself. Having said that, we had more than a couple of kind comments from those who expressed their happiness with being able to process their payments directly on-line. Given that there will be many others who liked what we did, and just haven’t said anything about it, it appears the project was a worthwhile detour.

And finally, for those of you who still prefer to pay by check by mail we prefer you do that too. While some may find that a pain in the butt, we pay all our invoices by check and try to minimize use of the credit card to those things we buy on line, such as ebay. My father, who originally set up the accounting systems for Compulife, liked to keep and have a paper trail, and any time we have had our accountants in to do the year end, or some sort of routine government audit, clean paper records really pay off.

ROP Factor Files To Change NextWith the online payment option now completed, we have turned our attention back to the next step in our data conversion work. We will be focusing on those products which have Return of Premiums and which use factors to calculate the total premium.

There was a delay in that process in September as we dealt with a new issue in the Canadian market. One of the companies in Canada has a term product where the renewal premiums for the policy use different modal factors from the initial premiums. We didn’t see that one coming.

We decided to implement our modal rate storage function to address the problem, and then realized that we had not previously dealt with having to read and process renewal modal premiums. Of course we encountered a bug which was really a contingency which we had not previously had to deal with). Believe it or not that sucked up about two weeks as we worked through the issue. One side benefit is we discovered a very small calculation issue that sometimes meant we were adding a penny to a modal premium, and so when we introduce that new version of the program to the U.S., sometime in late October or November, you may notice a previous minor discrepancy clears up.

While we make this stuff look easy, there are some tricky things that require some complex maneuvers to deal with properly. You will never really know just how good we really are at what we do; really (and if you read this far, I laughed when I wrote that).

What I can say with all seriousness, is that we work very hard to make you look good to your clients.