“There are nearly 200 That’s Rights! and Easy Royalties users in 19 different countries. We work with a wide spectrum of book publishers, from small/medium-size organizations to rights departments of some of the ‘big six,’ and with types of publishers including children’s, Christian, educational, general literature, romance, and more,” says Bloom. The company’s That’s Rights! software provides marketing support and royalty accounting for rights sellers, while its EasyRoyalties is a “low-cost, flexible, and comprehensive sales and author royalties accounting package,” according to Bloom. The latest addition to its product line is That’s Rights! Agents, which targets literary agents who need a rights and author management package.

Read the PW royalty software article.

Integrated digital asset management to store scanned PDFs of  royalty contracts.

An option for authors to request access to their statements online. This is a service that makes life easier for the author and greatly reduces costs in terms of printing and mailing. The author will have a full history of statements over time accessible at will.

Statement currency by author The CR&R system can now automatically identify the statement currency required from the author settings and generate that statement as required. This is independent of the currency settings for revenue currency and the publisher’s defined main currency.

Klopotek is available as a hosted or a stand-alone royalty software solution for medium to large publishers.

• Author activity
• Submissions (offers made to publishers) – track outstanding offers to publishers
• Licenses and rights sold – track rights sold or licensed and generate license agreements
• Invoicing, statement and payment followup – reports tell you if a royalty statement and/or royalty payment is past due
• Agent’s commissions and fees
• Generate an author activity report – that summarizes income generated by the author
• Send customized emails using templates that pull information from the relevant records

The first four chapters review accounting journal entries for the assets, liabilities, expenses, and income accounts.

This is followed by four chapters that cover how to report royalty expenses and income on financial statements, management reporting of royalty activity, tax reporting requirements and a review of key issues for auditors.

The book closes with an overview of best practices for royalty accounting and a chapter on royalty software selection.

The chapter on royalty software selection highlights the key criteria that many companies follow when selecting royalty software.  It closes with royalty software recommendations for various types of companies; small companies, mid-sized companies, large companies, music companies and companies that use Microsoft Dynamics financial management software.

The appendices include a listing of IRS tax forms for royalty reporting, a directory of royalty software vendors and instructions on how to configure QuickBooks for use with royalty software.

Example: If you receive a sales file from Amazon without a sales date, customer name or territory column you can populate this field for all import records (rows) with a static value. You do not have to open the file to add columns with these values.

If you receive sales files from Amazon UK, Amazon Italy and Amazon Germany you can create a saved map for each file that will automatically populate the customer name (Amazon Italy), territory (Europe) and currency (Euro) fields without having to modify the file.

You can see how static values work by downloading the 30 day trial version of Easy Royalties.

This update is available to licensed users at no charge.

You can view it by going to the Support: Video Tutorials or by clicking this link: http://www.easyroyaltiesusa.com/demos/Lesson_1_CreateDatabase.htm

Our goal at Easy Royalties USA.com is to release a new video tutorial each week. Our schedule for forthcoming tutorials include;

• October 17th: Creating a Royalty Statement
• October 24th: Recording payments of royalty statements

If you would like to see a tutorial on a specific topic send an email to edwin@kensai.net

Visit our stand at Hall 8.0, Booth L974.

To make an appointment.

At Frankfurt we will be unveiling our new That’s Authors product for Literary Agents.

New Features

• Author royalty statements, sales section: if the ‘do not aggregate’ option is set in the royalty rule, the customer name is appended to the Sale Type.
• Improvements to the layout of the “Standard” author royalty statement format (sales section). Some of the improvements also apply to the “monthly sales” format. Improvements include: Basis type description now in a column by itself, with user-defined column header; quantity now optional, with user-defined column header.

Bug Fixes

• Author payments view, lookup: this was causing an error. This has been fixed.
• Author detail window, Documents -> Cancel: this was causing an error. This has been fixed.
• Tools -> Backup (and possibly other operations) – this was erroneously failing with the message ‘a window is still open, close all windows’. (Problem since version 3.11.00.). This has been fixed.

Current users updating from a version prior to 3.11 should run the Royalty Statements Record List > Rebuild option on all prior statements. This will update printed royalty statements to account for new features. Users updating from version 3.11 or higher do not have to run the Rebuild operation.

A major advantage of Easy Royalties is that you can export products, royalty recipients, and sales from QuickBooks and import this information into Easy Royalties. You can export payments from Easy Royalties and import these payments; using a 3rd party application, into QuickBooks.

The document covers the seven steps for configuring QuickBooks for use with Easy Royalties.

1. Activate account numbering
2. Configure product records
3. Activate and create pricing levels
4. Define vendor types for royalty recipients
5. Configure customer records
6. Create general ledger accounts for royalties
7. Create export report

Download: 7 Steps to Configuring QuickBooks for Easy Royalties

1. Royalty is usually a percentage of wholesale sales.

2. Royalty agreements usually include an un-refundable royalty advance against future royalty earnings and a royalty guarantee. If the agreed upon level of royalties is not reached within a period, the difference is owed to the licensor.

Sample Toy Licensing Agreements

Toy License Agreement – Lucas Licensing Ltd. and Hasbro Inc.(Oct 13, 1997)

License Agreement for use of characters from Adventures of Gumby TV Series for use in Freezer Pops, Coolers, and Fruit Forms