Al-Jarida: Kuwaiti Daily Builds Odoo Subscription Management with Webkul
Project Snapshot
- URL: aljarida.com
- Country: Kuwait
- Industry Vertical: News Media
- Platform: Odoo v18
- Solution Provided: Custom Odoo subscription management for print and digital newspaper subscriptions, with delivery routes, freeze handling and Excel reports.
Merchant Story: Al-Jarida
Al-Jarida is an independent Arabic-language daily newspaper based in Kuwait.
Launched in 2007, it reports on politics, business, sports, culture and social issues.
Besides local and world news, much of its work is analysis and opinion.
Readers get the paper in two forms, a printed copy delivered to an address or a digital one.
Firms subscribe as well as readers, so one account can cover several copies sent to one office.
Why Al-Jarida Needed Odoo Subscription Management
Al-Jarida sells subscriptions rather than products, so an online store was never the shape of the problem.
A print subscription is a daily delivery promise that has to hold for months at a time.
Someone has to know who receives the paper and how many copies they take.
Which route it travels, and which distributor carries it, matter just as much.
Readers also travel, and they expect delivery to pause while they are away.
Missed days should then be added back at the end of the term.
Tracking that by hand across print and digital readers leaves room for missed copies and wrong dates.
What the team needed was one place holding the subscription, the route detail and the billing.
How Webkul Built Odoo Subscription Management for Al-Jarida
Webkul customized its Odoo Subscription Management module into a newspaper subscription system on Odoo v18.
The build follows a subscription across its whole life, from the first order through renewal, freezing and expiry.
Odoo already handled the recurring billing out of the box.
The Odoo customization went into the dispatch and operations layer the newsroom runs each morning.
Print and Digital Subscriptions
Both sit in the same system, but they reach the reader by different routes.
Print records carry a full delivery address, a copy count and a distribution route code and name.
Each one also names the distributor and the supervisor who answer for that route.
Digital copies go out over WhatsApp as a PDF, which suits readers outside the print routes.
Terms run from one month to two years.
Each one carries its own start date, end date and recurring payment.
Every record sits at Active, Frozen or Expired, so staff know whether the paper goes out tomorrow.
How Does the Freeze Workflow Extend a Subscription?
A freeze pauses delivery for a set period, then pushes the end date back to match.
The user records a freeze start date, a freeze end date and a reason.
Odoo works out the rest.
The extended end date is the original end date plus the total frozen days, so nobody loses paid-for copies.
When the freeze period ends the subscription resumes and the paper goes out again on the same route.
Because Odoo does the maths, the renewal date and the dispatch list agree without a spreadsheet.
How the Dispatch Team Tracks Changes
Dispatch staff need to see which records changed since the last print run.
A change flag marks any record that was edited.
Address changes and freeze or unfreeze events are tracked against it.
A set back trigger reverses one of those changes, and only named users hold the right to use it.
Staff can raise an activity by hand and assign it to a colleague when a case needs a follow-up.
A notes field carries the remarks that fit no other field.
Excel Reports for Subscriptions and Distribution
Webkul added eight XLSX reports so the team can answer questions without opening records one by one.
They cover distribution updates, subscription revenue and expired terms.
Others list frozen and unfrozen readers, print job quantity, and subscribers by route and by distributor.
The print job quantity report matters most before a print run.
It states how many copies the press has to produce.
Reports run on daily, weekly, monthly and yearly views, with date filters where a range is needed.
Results of Odoo Subscription Management for Al-Jarida
Al-Jarida now runs print and digital newspaper subscriptions end to end from one Odoo v18 system.
Billing, dispatch routing and the freeze calendar draw on the same record.
The press run and the renewal dates now come from one source instead of two.
Webkul delivers this kind of build through its Odoo implementation practice.
- Managed print and digital subscriptions in one Odoo system
- Automated freeze handling that extends the end date
- Tied routes, distributors and copy counts to each subscriber
- Tracked day-to-day changes under restricted user rights
- Produced eight Excel reports for revenue, dispatch and print planning