Payment
Your accounts can pay for their ads in a variety of ways including cash, checks and if they qualify, credit. Most newspapers require a new account to pay for their first ad in cash before setting up credit for future ads. Here's how most newspapers do things: Whether an account pays with a check or cash, it's likely that you'll need to fill out a receipt and give it to the account. You can get a pad of receipts from your manager. You'll then turn the cash or check in at your newspaper's cashier window or with the finance person in charge of receiving cash and checks. After turning everything in, you'll be given an "in-house" receipt that you can keep filed with other information on the account in case you need to refer to it again later.

The Credit Application
Helping your advertisers get credit with your newspaper is a simple but important part of your job. Most newspapers use a standard application for credit. It has been designed especially for the industry and is the standard for media credit departments nationwide. See a sample standard credit application on this page. Any finance person would tell you that the application needs to be completely filled in in order to help establish credit as quickly as possible. Usually credit can be established within 10 days and many requests can be processed more quickly if requested. If your newspaper uses the standard form or one similar to it, it will contain two places where a principal must sign: a bank authorization release which authorizes the company's bank to give information to your newspaper, and a general signature field which will legally give the company the responsibility to pay.

Sample Credit Application