A newspaper distribution agent in Kerala managing 300 subscribers across four or five delivery routes has a mental model of who gets what, which subscriber switched from one daily to another last month, and which house name on a particular road gets both the morning Malayalam daily and the Sunday magazine supplement. That mental model is fragile. A new delivery boy covering a route, a subscriber who calls about a missed delivery, a billing reconciliation at month-end — each of these requires the same data that exists in one person's head.
Subscriber Record by Household
Subscriber Name, House Name, Location, Address, and Route (Vazhi) together create the delivery address in the form that actually works for Kerala's residential addressing conventions. House names — the traditional Kerala practice of naming properties — are often more reliable for identifying a delivery point than street addresses in areas where formal address systems are inconsistently applied. A subscriber who lives at "Maniyath House, Ayyappankavu Road" is more precisely located by house name and road than by a formal address that may not exist in a GPS system.
Route is the operational field that determines which delivery sequence this subscriber belongs to. Organizing subscribers by route is what makes daily delivery efficient — the delivery boy completes one route before starting the next, rather than delivering to a scattered sequence of addresses. The route field is also what allows the agency to reassign subscribers to different delivery runs when route optimization is needed or when a specific delivery point changes.
Phone 1, Phone 2, and Contact handle the subscriber communication layer. A contact who isn't the subscriber — a family member, a building manager — needs to be listed separately from the primary subscriber phone numbers. When a delivery dispute needs to be resolved quickly before the route is completed, the ability to call the right contact at the right number is the operational tool.
The Publication Matrix
Daily Newspaper 1, Daily Newspaper 2, Daily Newspaper 3, Weekly 1, Weekly 2, Weekly 3, Fortnightly 1, Fortnightly 2, Fortnightly 3, Monthly 1, Monthly 2, Monthly 3 create a complete publication subscription profile for each subscriber. A single household may take two daily newspapers (perhaps Mathrubhumi and Manorama), one weekly magazine, and a monthly periodical. Each publication is a separate delivery event on a different schedule.
The Item subheader groups the publication types. This structure allows the agency to generate delivery schedules per publication type — all subscribers taking a specific weekly, sorted by route, for the Wednesday delivery run. It allows billing calculations per subscriber across all active subscriptions. It allows tracking publication-level changes when a subscriber adds or cancels a specific title without affecting others.
At the billing cycle, the multi-publication record per subscriber is what makes the monthly statement accurate. A subscriber who takes two dailies and one monthly generates different charges than one taking only a daily. The field-per-publication structure makes that calculation mechanical rather than dependent on memory of each subscriber's specific subscription combination.