Lou Ellman to host free LIMA roundtable discussion at 2011 Licensing Expo

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Lou

LIMA is offering a FREE group of roundtable discussions for attendees of the 2011 Licensing International Expo. The event takes place on June 15, 2011 at 9 AM PST in the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.

Discussion leaders and topics will include:

  • J.J. Ahearn, Licensing Street: “What Makes A Merchandisable Property?”
  • Pete Canalichio, Licensing Brands Inc.: “Tying Licensing Into Event Marketing”
  • Lou Ellman, RoyaltyZone: “Measuring The Success of A Licensing Program”
  • Bob Traub, Chorion: “Working With Retail”

A maximum of 70 registrations will be accepted. Join the discussion!

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Lou Ellman to present “Licensing Equals Opportunity” at the SGIA Business Development Conference

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Lou

Lou Ellman, founder of royalty software company RoyaltyZone, will present “Licensing Equals Opportunity” at the Specialty Graphic Imaging Association (SGIA) Business Development Conference on May 11, 2011 in Denver, Colorado.

Lou’s talk is an informative and entertaining introduction to the world of brand and patent licensing. Discover ways to grow your brand and increase revenue through this intro to trademark, copyright, and patent licensing. Join us for an informative walk-through of a typical brand licensing program, including:

  • Key terminology
  • Roles and responsibilities between licensors, licensees, and licensing agents
  • Best practices for success
  • Resources for quick-starting a licensing program
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What is brand licensing?

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Lou

Curious about brand licensing? Check out this short video explaining how brand licensing works, courtesy of Advanstar (the folks behind the Licensing Expo).

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RoyaltyZone releases enhanced Royalty Participation features

Posted on March 10, 2011 by Lou

Participation royalties are a portion of earned royalties that must be paid to a third party, such as a licensing agent, intellectual property owner, actor, athlete, inventor, or artist. Participation royalties are often paid for only a specific licensed property or group of properties. Participation can also be limited to a single license agreement, or a specific territory.

Calculating participation royalties using spreadsheets is very difficult. Licensors must analyze sales data across all of their licensee’s royalty reports to identify only those sales and royalties that match the participation rights criteria. In addition, Licensors must filter out any royalties that have been reported, but are not yet paid. Recouped advances, advance payments, and guarantee payments must also be analyzed and included. For these reasons, participation royalty reporting is an ideal process to be automated by royalty software.

RoyaltyZone’s new Royalty Participation features automate the royalty calculation and reporting process for Participation Agreements:

  • Define and track Participation Agreement terms, including rights, rates, advances, guarantees, and fees
  • Create participation royalty reporting rules to define when reports are due, and what data fields need to be included
  • Identify source agreements from your pool of licensed out license agreements
  • Create and calculate participation royalty reports with just one click – all matching sales and royalty data is automatically imported!
  • Export participation royalty details to XL for distribution to third party recipients
  • Analyze results and measure success with Trends and Analysis charts
  • Create and pay invoices for royalty owed
  • View the full history of every royalty report and invoice for each participation agreement
  • Receive email reminders with participation royalty reports are due

To learn more about managing royalty participation with RoyaltyZone, check out these tutorials:

How do I create a Participation Agreement?

How do I keep Participation Agreement and Source Agreement rights in sync?

How do I create a Participation Royalty Report?

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Lou Ellman to host “Brand Licensing 101″ session at RISE conference

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Lou

RoyaltyZone founder Lou Ellman is hosting a free session titled “Brand Licensing 101” on March 8, 2011 during the RISE conference in Austin, TX.

Discover ways to grow your brand and increase revenue with trademark, copyright, and patent licensing. Topics will include an introduction to licensing terminology and agreements, the roles and responsibilities of licensors, licensees, and licensing agents, best practices, and resources to get started.

To register, visit: https://www.riseglobal.org/sessions/detail/licensing-101

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Shift License Agreement Start Dates

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Lou

Happy Holidays from RoyaltyZone! Our gift to you? The power to move time.

You now have two choices for changing the start date of a license agreement:

  • Start Date Only
  • Shift All Terms

With the new Date Shift feature, you can enter all of the agreement terms, then shift the start date as necessary until the contract is fully executed.  All start dates and payment schedules for entered agreement terms will be shifted to match the new start date.  You can also change or shift the start date for a published agreement via Amend.

For example, let’s say you want to change the start date to 3/1/11 for a one year license agreement with one royalty rate and a single guarantee with quarterly payments.  The original dates are:

  • Start Date: 1/1/11
  • End Date: 12/31/11
  • Royalty Rate Effective: 1/1/11 to 12/31/11
  • Guarantee Effective: 1/1/11 to 12/31/11
  • Guarantee Payments: 1/1/11, 4/1/11, 7/1/11, and 10/1/11

Selecting “Start Date Only” will result in these changes:

  • Start Date: 3/1/11
  • End Date: 12/31/11
  • Royalty Rate Effective: 3/1/11 to 12/31/11
  • Guarantee Effective: 3/1/11 to 12/31/11
  • Guarantee Payments: 3/1/11, 4/1/11, 7/1/11, and 10/1/11

Selecting “Shift All Terms” will result in these changes:

  • Start Date: 3/1/11
  • End Date: 2/28/12
  • Royalty Rate Effective: 3/1/11 to 2/28/12
  • Guarantee Effective: 3/1/11 to 2/28/12
  • Guarantee Payments: 3/1/11, 7/1/11, 10/1/11, and 1/1/12
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Currency normalization for multi-currency license agreements and royalty reports

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Lou

We released some exciting new features for RoyaltyZone royalty software last night that will help licensors and licensing agents better manage license agreements across multiple currencies.

Choose your Account Currency.  Visit Setup > Currencies to select your account currency.  You can still select any currency for individual license agreements.

Exchange Rate Data is automatically imported to your RoyaltyZone account each day from the European Central Bank (http://www.ecb.int/).  View historical exchange rates via Setup > Currencies.

Currency Normalization. All foreign currency royalty reports can now be viewed in your account currency at the click of a button.  In addition, all summary charts and exported reports are normalized to your account currency.  RoyaltyZone uses the average exchange rate over the entire reporting period (quarter, month, etc) to calculate normalized currencies.

  1. Click on any foreign currency royalty report
  2. Click “View in USD” (or whatever you designate as your account currency) to see the normalized results
  3. Click “View in EUR” (or whatever the agreement currency was) to return to the original results
  4. Reporting Period, Custom Time Frame, Property, and Category summaries and export files all display normalized results

BONUS feature: improved Category reports! Licensors can now drill up or down through all category hierarchies to view royalty trends and analyze results. Visit Associations > Categories to see it in action: expand any category to view it’s sub-categories, and click on any category hierarchy level to view its Royalty Trends and Analysis chart.

Royalty results by category

Click to enlarge image

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The $55 million dollar royalty reporting error

Posted on November 18, 2010 by Lou

$55 million.  That’s a lot of scratch.  Hard to imagine that amount of money going unnoticed.  For 15 years.

But it did, in an extreme and costly example of how paper and spreadsheet royalty report templates allow Licensors to over look glaring mistakes made by Licensees.  In this case, an Australian Mining company unintentionally under reported iron ore royalties for 15 years by inadvertently using the wrong royalty rate on their royalty reports.

Even worse, the $55 million only covers the last 2.5 years of underpaid royalties:

The back-payment covers only the 2 1/2-year period to June 30 to correct what appears to have been a huge clerical error.  The mining giant will avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties it should have paid since 1995.

How did this happen?  Quite simple – the Licensee used the wrong royalty rate (3.75% of Net Sales instead of 7.5% of Net Sales) on their royalty reports, and nobody noticed.  For 15 years!

It is understood that neither the government nor Rio were aware for at least 12 years that the incorrect royalty was being paid.  The problem is believed to have been a clerical error.

How can you prevent a clerical error resulting in $55 million, $55 thousand, or even $55 dollars in lost royalty revenue?  Easy.

Replace spreadsheet based royalty report templates with royalty software to calculate royalties owed.

Why?

  1. Royalty software always uses the correct royalty rate.  Always. (even when there are multiple or variable rates on an agreement)
  2. Royalty software never makes math errors.  Never.
  3. Royalty software does not make copy and paste mistakes.
  4. Royalty software does not edit or delete your spreadsheet formulas.
  5. Royalty software always uses the correct exchange rate for currency conversions.
  6. Royalty software lets you instantly review and analyze royalty data.

We often discover similar historical royalty reporting errors as our trademark licensing and technology licensing customers are ramping up with RoyaltyZone.  The errors we find often pay for the software many times over!

Full article here.

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Configurable Payment Instructions

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Lou

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!

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FOB Royalty Rates

Posted on August 30, 2010 by Lou

License agreements commonly use an FOB royalty rate to offset the difference in FOB pricing.  The FOB royalty rate is usually an additional 1% to 3% higher than the standard royalty rate (for percent of net sales royalty rates).

FOB stands for “Free On Board”, and is always used in conjunction with a port of loading. Indicating “FOB port” means that the seller pays for transportation of the goods to the port of shipment, plus loading costs. The buyer pays cost of marine freight transport, insurance, unloading, and transportation from the arrival port to the final destination. The passing of risks occurs when the goods pass the ship’s rail at the port of shipment.

Any royalty rate can be assigned an FOB equivalent in RoyaltyZone royalty software.

FOB royalty rates in RoyaltyZone royalty software

Licensees indicate if a sale is FOB when entering or uploading sales transaction data in RoyaltyZone.

Licensees indicate FOB sales

RoyaltyZone calculates royalties using the standard or FOB royalty rate.  Licensors and Licensees can rest assured that the correct royalty rate will be applied for each sales transaction.

Automating FOB royalty rates is another example of streamlining royalty management processes with RoyaltyZone royalty software.

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