What is an apporpriate way to deal with multiple patrons that subscribe on only one account? For example, we have Mr. & Mrs. Smith on one account that subscribe with Mr. & Mrs. Jones on their account. Payment for the subscriptions have been maintained in the Jones' record, contributions are entered in their respective records.
We have used Associations to associate the two records, then I've added the names in each others account in Aliases, but I don't know if that is the best solution.
Any advice would be appreciated.
What you've described is essentially what we do: association and an alias. It could be handy to use a specific alias type for this, if you want, but if you've got a specific association type then that takes care of isolating who/why. You could have a scheduled job to generate the alias from the association if you wanted, and that'd save a step. This is another one of those "v.11 will make this happier" scenarios.