The Royalty Automation Handbook
Your Roadmap to an Efficient, Simple, Recipient-Friendly Royalty Management Operation
Royalty management can be overwhelmingly complex, leading to both risks and inefficiencies for the business, and stress and pressure to those doing the work. Fortunately, the process can be automated for greater efficiency. In this handbook, we’ll provide you with:
- 2 options for reducing your effort by up to 90%
- An introduction to The Royalty Management Lifecycle™ Model and instructions on how to use it to simplify your current process
- Techniques for maximizing accuracy and reducing the risk of errors
- 3 tools you can offer your authors to enhance royalty recipient relationships
- An understanding of royalty accounting and how it impacts both your P&L and your balance sheet
Why Choose MetaComet® Royalty Automation?
Royalty calculations are all about manipulating data: contract data, sales data, payment data, etc. By using Royalty Tracker® to record all that data in a consolidated place, your work becomes almost entirely automated. Rather than spending time laboriously calculating, you can simply review the results.
Royalty Automation with Royalty Tracker®
Royalty Tracker® stores your contracts as data. Once you import sales, it automatically does all your royalty calculations and accounting.
- Save Time
- Reduce Risk
- Generate royalty accrual reports
Sales Consolidation
Many publishers receive 30, 40 or even more sales files EVERY MONTH! That can easily mean over 500 files every year. Consolidating that sales data is time consuming and error prone. Our Sales Aggregator is the answer:
- Memorizes any file layout for easy import
- Saves weeks of effort each year
- Automatic currency conversion
- Creates a central repository for all your sales files
On Demand Royalty Statements
Your royalty statements are ready when you are. Even if you are not ready, you can still put up “interim” royalty statements to see how an author is performing. Distributing statements is easy:
- Securely share online through Royalty Portal
- Email directly through Royalty Tracker
- Print and send through traditional mail
Contract Templates
Most publishers have some consistency among their contracts, especially for newer titles. Create new contracts in Royalty Tracker with ease using our contract templates.
- Memorize standard contracts
- Easily apply memorized contracts to any agreement
- Make adjustments as necessary
The Tools You Need For Accurate & Efficient Royalty Automation
MetaComet® royalty automation gives your organization complete control of royalty calculations, reports, and payments paired with un-matched business intelligence and ease of use.
Our publisher software Royalty Tracker® gives you the powerful tools you need to simplify and accelerate the process of paying royalties:
- Handle any contract complexity.
- Remove the tedious task of recording sales data.
- Increase efficiency by integrating with other existing systems in your business.
- Provide online statement access through Royalty Portal.
- Handle digital and eBook royalties with ease.
- Quickly and easily research any author or title.
- Simple, intuitive interface.
- Manage your rights and permissions.
- Electronic royalty statement delivery
- Customizable royalty statements.
- Protect your work and your data against loss.
- Better understand your business through powerful reports.
Handle Any Contract Complexity
Our publisher software was initially designed for use in the world’s largest publishing houses, and can handle virtually any contract complexity including:
- Unlimited authors/editors/contributors per title.
- Unlimited royalty calculation rules.
- Sliding scales (aka tiers or escalators) based on units, dollars, and discounts.
- Aggregated escalators.
- Escalators reset for any frequency (period, quarterly, annually, or never).
- Royalties based on net, list, sale price or flat rate.
- Advances, advance splits and adjustments.
- Minimum payment thresholds.
- Any royalty period, including “off cycle” royalties (i.e. Jan. 15 – Jun. 15).
- Reserves against returns.
- Splits.
- Bundling/Kits.
- Full support for digital content.
Royalty Automation: Remove the Tedious Task of Recording Sales Data
One of the most time consuming aspects of royalty management is aggregating your sales files, and associating them with the appropriate titles. With Sales Aggregator, this problem goes away. Simply upload your files and Sales Aggregator does the rest.
Our publisher software flags and displays sales errors, and quickly notifies you to make a correction. It can identify a wide range of errors including invalid sales entries, missing contracts, and incorrect ISBNs. The software then automatically applies the sales correctly, eliminating the need to do any additional work.
Increase Efficiency by Integrating With Other Systems in Your Business
Royalty Tracker® is designed to integrate with virtually any other system in your organization, and automatically load or transmit information.
Do you use accounting systems to cut your checks? Do you already have a database of your titles and ISBNs? Do you have a record of all of your authors and their addresses?
Eliminate the need to enter data twice.
- Accounts Payable Integration
- Title Management Integration
- Fulfillment Integration
- General Ledger Integration
Royalty Tracker® can integrate with virtually any other system in your business, including:
- Oracle/NetSuite
- QuickBooks
- Great Plains
- PeopleSoft
- JD Edwards
- Firebrand
- Tipalti
Handle Digital and eBook Royalties with Ease
Royalty Tracker® enables you to easily handle royalties on your titles whether in traditional formats such as hard cover, paperback, and audio, or in the “new” formats, including eBooks, “chunks,” or snippets.
When it comes to digital content, it keeps you on the cutting edge. MetaComet Systems’ executives have served in key industry positions involved in developing the standards for digital content.
Quickly and Easily Research Any Author or Title
Need to quickly look up an author’s history? Are authors calling with questions about their statements? With RoyaltyTracker, you can quickly and easily view and analyze all the data in your system.
Simple, Intuitive Interface: Software Made for Publishers
The key to simplifying royalty management is to store your data in a way that makes sense and is easy to access and view. It needs to be logically organized, and easy to navigate.
MetaComet® Systems has spent the last 20 years studying our customers’ habits, and continuously improving our interface to maximize its ease of use.
As a result, we can teach you everything that you need to know about Royalty Tracker® in just a few short hours. There is no need for day-long training classes and massive user manuals (though those are both available, if you’d like).
Additionally, our cutting edge technology enables us to (with your permission) actually watch you work through the web, so we can easily answer your questions and show you the best way to work.
Customizable Royalty Statements
You know the information that your authors want to see. Too much information leads to confusion and questions. Too little information can lead to the same.
Choose which of the many statement layouts you wish to use for author royalties. Some options show detailed ISBN level transactions, some roll it up by source, some show every transaction.
If you would like something more specialized, Royalty Tracker’s statements are 100% customizable while still allowing you to benefit from royalty automation.
Protect Your Work and Your Data Against Loss
Rest assured that your data is protected: MetaComet Systems is one of the few publishing software vendors that is SOC 2 Type II certified secure.
Better Understand Your Business Through Powerful Reports
Gain important insight into your operations and the business through Royalty Tracker’s royalty automation. Track royalty and rights related financial performance of titles. Generate detailed title by title analysis.
If you want to manipulate the data yourself, export Microsoft® Excel® files that you can sort and manipulate as needed.
Finally, our business intelligence suite gives you full access to your detailed data, enabling you to run your own reports through any standard reporting or business intelligence package.
Contact us today for a no-obligation consultation.