Licensors and Licensing Agents often specify different payment instructions or bank accounts for different types of payment.  For example, royalties may be paid to one account, marketing contribution fees to another, and advance payments to yet another.

RoyaltyZone royalty software now offers a solution to this problem.   We added another new feature today: configurable payment instructions, which allows you to:

1. Create different payment instructions for each invoice type (royalty, advance, guarantee, and fee).
2. Create multiple verbiage options for each invoice type.
3. Assign instructions to an Agreement on its details page.
4. Edit payment instructions on each individual invoice before sending.

To use the new feature:

1. Go to Setup > Invoices
2. We created a default entry using your existing payment instructions for each invoice type
   1. Click “edit” to make changes
   2. Click “Create New” to add a new instruction
3. All existing agreements are set to use the default entries
4. To change the instructions used for an agreement, visit the agreement, then click “Edit”
   1. New agreements: set on the description page
   2. Published agreements: set on the edit details page

More cool new royalty management features coming soon!

RoyaltyZone web based royalty software now offers product category hierarchy management.  You can create as many sub-levels of hierarchy as necessary to effectively manage all of your license agreements.  With upload capabilities and drag and drop editing, it is a breeze to create your universe of product categories in RoyaltyZone.

Check out this brief tutorial on how to use the new product category hierarchy features:

We released some cool new RoyaltyZone features last night, with more on the way soon!  Here’s what’s new:

Additional Agreement Fields
Capture and track additional license agreement data in RoyaltyZone:

1. Royalty Start Date – this replaces the “Ignore Historical” check box and lets you select any date to define the first expected royalty report
2. Account Manager - designate any RoyaltyZone user (you can add more if you need to) as the Account Manager for the agreement.  You can sort agreements by Account Manager on the Licensees page.
3. Liability Insurance Requirements – enter any insurance requirements (visible to the licensee)
4. Exclusive – enter any exclusivity terms (visible to the licensee)
5. Marketing Dates – enter any marketing date info (visible to the licensee)

Large Royalty Report Processing
RoyaltyZone has processed royalty reports as large as 52,000 sales transactions, but those big reports take some time to crunch.  Licensees uploading reports with more than 1,000 sales transactions will now be notified by email when the royalty report is calculated and ready for submission.  No more staring at a spinning wheel!  Go have some fun (or work, if you must) and RZ will ping you when the report is ready.

Improved Error Messaging for Uploads
We love to hear your feedback!  Per your requests -  we made some changes to the error messaging for sales uploads.  We improved the text content, made the display area larger, and moved the action links to a more prominent location.  The goal is to give you easy to understand instructions on how to fix data issues in your upload files.  Let us know if you have additional suggestions for improvement!

Login Management
Can’t remember your user name or need access to RoyaltyZone?  Click “Request an Account” from the login, and enter your email.  If you already have an account, you’ll receive an email with your login credentials.  If your company has a RoyaltyZone account, the account admin will asked by email to add you as a user.

Coming (very) soon: custom date Trends & Analysis reports, advertising/marketing fee management, royalty distribution improvements, and more!

The RoyaltyZone Trends and Analysis (TNA) module now provides instant access to key performance metrics for licensed properties and product categories.

Licensors can determine their best (and worst) selling properties and categories and identify opportunities to generate additional licensing revenue.

For each licensed property access:

• Royalties, Net Sales, and Quantity Sold
• # of active agreements and Ranking
• Top Categories
• Top SKU’s
• Top Licensees
• Top Territories
• Top Distribution Methods

For each product category access:

• Royalties, Net Sales, and Quantity Sold
• # of active agreements and Ranking
• Top Properties
• Top SKU’s
• Top Licensees
• Top Territories
• Top Distribution Methods

What is a licensed property? The intellectual property, normally a trademark or copyright, which could be a name, symbol, slogan, design, logo, icon, package design, image, photograph, phrase, work of authorship, or character – or any combination of these elements.

What is a product category? A group of related products that, bundled together, can be classified as a separate entity or class, such as: apparel, personal accessories, toys or electronics.

The RoyaltyZoners have been hard at work turning your suggestions into new features:

Improved Licensee User Experience. Hundreds of licensees rely on RoyaltyZone to submit royalty reports, pay invoices, and view license agreement terms.  We’ve listened to your questions and feedback over the last year, and have responded with a completely redesigned user interface for licensees.

• The Dashboard is better organized, making it easier to find what you are looking for quickly.
• We moved profile and product management into the Royalty Report submission process, so you can login and get everything done in one place.
• Creating and submitting royalty reports takes less time.  We streamlined the report submission process and removed extra steps and links.

User feedback has been positive so far – we’d love to hear your thoughts – just click “Feedback” from any page within RoyaltyZone to send us your questions, comments, or suggestions.

Multi Currency. You can now select any base currency for your license agreements.  Licensee royalty reports, invoices, and balances are all formatted with proper currency symbol.  Next step: currency conversion, targeted for Q2 2010 release.

Address Book. Want to generate a mailing list of all of your licensee contacts?  Just click on the fancy new address book link, and all of your licensee contact data is instantly exported to XL.   Your marketing folks will thank you!

Partial Invoice Payments. Invoices can now be partially paid or received, with full payment history, notes, and the ability to track remaining balance.

Manage Agreements Internally. Licensors can now choose to manage one or more agreements internally,  without involving the licensee.  Licensors can submit royalty reports and manage invoices on behalf of the licensee, then easily grant access to the licensee at any time, whenever ready to do so.

More cool stuff on the way soon, including property and category reporting, streamlined royalty distribution reporting and payments, and more…

RoyaltyZone users can now add Minimum Royalty Per Unit (MRU) royalty rates to their agreements.   An MRU royalty rate defines a standard rate (X% of Net Sales) and a MRU ($X per unit).  RoyaltyZone compares the two calculated royalties and selects the higher (or lower, if preferred) of the two.  For example:

Standard Rate = 10% of Net Sales, MRU = $1 per Unit, Preference = Highest

• Example 1: Units Sold = 10, Gross Sales = $90: Rate Used = MRU, Royalties Owed = $10.00
• Example 2: Units Sold = 10, Gross Sales = $110: Rate Used = Standard, Royalties Owed = $11.10

We released some exciting new functionality to RoyaltyZone last night!  Here are the new features for your royalty management pleasure:

• Improved Royalty Distribution Reports.  Create as many distribution recipients as necessary for each licensed property.  RoyaltyZone automates the creation of distribution reports and allows for deductions.

• Fully automated data uploads.  Licensees can now upload ALL of their sales and product data, with no manual entry at all.  We added upload review and data mapping functionality to make sure that all imported data is accurate and complete.
• Better SKU management.  Now you can Add or Ignore unrecognized SKUs found in your uploaded sales transactions.  This is a huge time saver and makes RoyaltyZone even easier for Licensees to use!
• Email notification management.  You now have the power to select which users will receive email notifications from RoyaltyZone (don’t let it go to your head).
• Wire Transfers. Licensees can now view your Wire Transfer instructions, mark payment sent, and capture the appropriate Wire Transfer payment information in RoyaltyZone.  
• Streamlined Licensee Invitations.  You can now view the status of your Licensee invitations, make changes if necessary, and resend invitations.  We also provide the ability to browse all of the available Licensees in RoyaltyZone.  Make new friends, or better yet, find new Licensees!
• Improved Financial History.  We added some new fields to all of the License Agreement financial performance tables to make it easier for you to see how things are going.
• Invoice Contact Info.  You now have two possible address and contact info options in RoyaltyZone – one for your company profile, and a second that will appear on your invoices.
• Disaster Recovery.  Your sensitive data is backed up every six hours and stored offsite via Amazon S3.

No rest for the weary – we are already working on the next release.  Improved product management, new royalty rate options, currency conversion, and more!

We are pleased to announce that RoyaltyZone 1.1 was released last night, with lots of new features and goodies:

• Create new adhoc invoices with multiple line items
• Assess and invoice late fee for late royalty reports
• Consolidated Dashboard views for Royalty Reports and Invoices with appropriate action buttons
• Improved Royalty Report and Invoice audit trail
• New Royalty Report fields
• Auto-Reminders for upcoming royalty reports, advance payments, guarantee payment schedules, and agreements due for renewal
• Improved navigation
• Invoice setup – default payment terms and auto-numbering
• Improved handling of future advances
• Consolidated agreement views
• Ability to invoice a guarantee payment as an advance
• RoyaltyZone message panel
• Both quantities and sales amount for returns now captured
• Electronic payments via PayPal
• Invoice auto-generated for approved royalty reports
• Improved functionality for receiving invoice payment
• Assorted bug fixes and user interface improvements