Royalty Software

Royalty Contract Management Best Practices

How should you handle royalty contracts? Traditionally publishers would file the contracts in a draw and when they needed them pull them from the file, hoping that they were correctly filed and not missing.

Today many publishings scan the contracts and save them as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. These scanned contracts are saved on shared hard drive that is backed up nightly.

Editors and publishers can access copies of the contract from their desk or from home. These copies cannot be misplaced nor stained with coffee or coke.

Some royalty software solutions, such as Acumen, Klopotek, knkPublishing and Publishing Technology's Advance allow you to access these copies from their system's author, title and contract records.

Configuring QuickBooks for Royalty Software

If you want to configure QuickBooks for royalty software there is a free report on this topic at http://www.royaltysoftware.info/

This article covers setting up your chart of accounts, configuring products and configuring vendor records.

In the chart of accounts section they recommended tracking nomal accounts payable and royalties payable in two seperate accounts. This is the same practice that I have seen followed at larger publishers. Royalties payable are reported seperately on the monthly balance sheets so that management can see the extent of their royalty liabilities at a glance.

Example 1: Single Account

Accounts Payable.....$100,000

Example 2: Seperate Accounts

Accounts Payable.....$60,000
Royalties Payable.....$40,000

In addition, this report also recommend that you track unearned royalties (royalty statements with a credit balance) in a seperate asset account instead of lumping it in with your accounts payable (or royalties payable). In fact, this is is the correct practice if you want to follow GAAP, and its what outside CPA firms will tell you to do. Why? A unearned royalties are what authors owe you. Including this in payables would understate your actual payables.

Peachtree Royalty Software Solution

A publisher recently downloaded our software and liked what he saw. He then contacted us and asked if our solution could import payments due into Peachtree accounting software from Sage.

After receiving this request we contact Sage to find out if Peachtree could import accounts payable invoices (payments due to authors). After confirming that it could we downloaded the software and began to test it.

During the testing process we determined that although it did work, further polishing would reduce the number of steps required. These requirements were passed onto the software developers and within a week they had added new functionality to the software that makes the process easier.

Now, thats what I like about Easy Royalties software developers - their rapid software development lifecycle.

Dynamics NAV Royalty Software

Are you looking for royalty software that integrates with Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision)?

If so, we just came across a solution called knkPublishing that is tested and certified by Microsoft.

knkPublishing is a complete publishing management system that is seamlessly integrated with Dynamics NAV. You can start with a the royalties module and as your needs change add additional modules; such as editorial management, production management, advertising and subscriptions.

It may cost more than the competition, but the reason for that is that the developers of knkPublishing pay Microsoft a fee to certify and test the software. This guarantees that the software will work with the current and future versions of Dynamics NAV.

Export Author Payments to QuickBooks

Have your wondered how to export author payments from your royalty software into QuickBooks?

You can do it easily with Transaction Pro Importer ($199.95) from http://www.baystateconsulting.com/

With this software you can import an Easy Royalties payment file into QuickBooks. This will automatically create vendor bills so that you don't have to do so yourself one by one.

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