Do you have trouble managing all your sales data?

• Keeping track of all the files received each month from each source
• Combining those files into a single sales database
• Managing currency conversions
• Reporting and analyzing your sales
• Using those sales to calculate royalties

This article, a part of our Royalty Management Life Cycle™ series, shows how we can help you with this aspect of your operations.

Most companies receive sales data from multiple sources.  For example, a book publisher may receive monthly sales files from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Apple, and so on.  A music licensing company may receive sales from iTunes, Harry Fox, ASCAP, BMI, etc.

To have much practical use, these sales files must typically be consolidated.  This means aligning all the columns of each file so that they are in the same position, appending all the files together, converting currency when needed, and removing extraneous data.   Here are some of the pain points from this process:

• Hours or days of effort
• Prone to human error
• Doesn’t keep track of what files were received and when

These in turn leads to risks:

• Overpaying or underpaying royalties
• Using incorrect exchange rates
• Misreporting sales
• Missing entire sales files
• Inability to meet audit requirements

To help our customers optimize this aspect of the Royalty Management Life Cycle™ Model, we developed our Sales Aggregation tool (available to subscribers of AuthorPortal.com).

For each file you receive, simply inform the Sales Aggregator of the file type and upload the file.  Here is the Sales Aggregator main page:

Now simply indicate the file type:

The Sales Aggregator does the rest.  Here are all the files you have ever uploaded:

Now all your files are in a central repository.  Want to reference an individual file?  Simply select its corresponding “View” in the actions column:

Now that all of your sales files are in a single database, you can easily drop them into an Excel file and analyze them to your heart’s content:

And using AuthorPortal’s integration capabilities, you can easily share this data with other systems and people, such as Royalty Tracker.

In summary, AuthorPortal.com’s Sales Aggregation tools saves hours of effort and mitigates the risk of this critical component of The Royalty Management Life Cycle ™ Model.

To learn more, please contact us at any time.

David Marlin

David Marlin is the President and Co-Founder of MetaComet® Systems, a prominent provider of royalty automation tools. Since founding the company in 2000, David has spearheaded the development of a suite of best-in-class systems that effectively facilitate royalty processes for nearly 200 publishers. David has also served as the chair for The Book Industry Study Group’s Rights Committee and Digital Sales Committee.

Before establishing MetaComet Systems, David served as a technology consultant for renowned publishers, collaborating with notable companies such as Random House, Penguin, HarperCollins, Holtzbrinck, Macmillan, Scholastic, Time Warner, and many others. David holds both an MBA and a BA from Columbia University in New York.