For years, MetaComet® Systems has worked closely with businesses who handle royalty management. The company’s Royalty Tracker® System has quickly become the industry standard in helping to improve both efficiency and accuracy.

Since its development, MetaComet has strived to continually provide high-quality updates to the Royalty Tracker System, so that its many customers will always have access to the best and most convenient ways of using the royalty software.

In February, MetaComet is scheduled to release royalty statement emailing capability for the Royalty Tracker System. This new feature will allow publishers and other licensors to email royalty statements directly from the system’s royalty software platform. Instead of having to manually attach PDF files to emails or even send printed out statements via snail mail, this new feature will allow licensors to communicate through email without any manual intervention at all.

“In today’s digital world, our trading partners rely upon and have come to expect digital royalty capabilities. The intellectual property world has been behind the times in this regard. Now Royalty Tracker enables them to be cutting edge, while providing real value in terms of cost savings,” said company President David Marlin.

The new feature boasts many benefits, including reduced costs through the elimination of both postage and printing, as well as the labor costs associated with sending out the statements. Administrative costs will also be lowered, since having to manually attach PDF files to emails or prepare envelopes for mailing can be time consuming.

Another bonus of the new royalty statement emailing capability is improved relations with licensors, who are increasingly accustomed to receiving electronic communications and transactions.

No special software or add-ins are necessary to use the updated system; Royalty Tracker System users will only need to select which statements they wish to email and the royalty accounting software will do the rest.

Because royalty tracking can be confusing and challenging at times, MetaComet has made a concerted effort to provide the best customer service it can to its many clients. With its 24-hour U.S.-based availability, issues that need expert help right away can be handled and solved quickly and efficiently.

About MetaComet Systems
MetaComet Systems services licensors of virtually any intellectual or physical property including music, video, television, merchandising, and licensing. The company features a royalty management software program called the Royalty Tracker System which helps licensors stay abreast of their royalty payment needs. The company recently announced the upcoming launch of the system’s royalty statement emailing capability. For more information, please visit http://www.metacomet.com

Here is a list of the most popular enhancements:

• Subsidiary Rights Management
  • Generate dunning letters for late payments
  • Generate Word or PDF versions of subright agreements
  • Ability to import subrights and automatically match them to corresponding subright agreements
  • Ability to automatically generate subright agreements for subright receipts missing agreements
  • Added language pick list
  • Ability to set default languages on agreements
  • Ability to set default country on agreements
• Royalty Statements
  • Ability to export statements to Excel
  • Enabled saving statements as PDFs
  • Added several new statement layouts
  • Enabled logo inclusion on several statement layouts
  • Added statement cover pages
  • Added new file naming options when generating PDF or Word statements
• System Integration
  • Enhancements to kit explosions
  • Enhancements to data migration tools
  • Add sales pre-processor to enable miscellaneous enhancements to sales files prior to import into Royalty Tracker
  • Validate discounts
  • Enhance data
  • Etc.
  • Option to validate discount rates when importing sales
  • Enabled payment vouchers to have flexible layouts
  • Added ability to reverse imported sales and all corresponding royalty calculations
• User Interface
• Reorganized menus
• Reports
  • Subrights
    • Added “Agreements Missing Countries” report
  • Workflow
    • Enhanced and added new payout workflow reports
    • Sales reconciliation reports now allow filtering by subrights
    • Outstanding receivables report
  • Financial
    • Created new Balances report
    • Created new options for month-end reporting
  • Allow users to save reports in multiple formats:
    • Excel
    • PDF
    • CSV
    • TSV
  • Enhanced “Mailing List Report”

We are not resting on our laurels.  Several exciting new features are coming soon.  We are particularly excited about our new royalty statement emailing capability, expected in our 2012.2 release (April).  This new feature allows you to automatically email royalty statements to royalty recipients directly from Royalty Tracker – save huge on postage, protect the environment, save time, and better service your partners.

Do you have new features that you would like to see added to Royalty Tracker?  Please email us and let us know!

Back in 2009, we made significant strategic changes to the way we operate, and really saw the fruits of our labors in 2011.

First, while we have always had a customer focus, we intensified that into a customer commitment.  Our objective is to set realistic expectations, and then do everything that we can to exceed them.  No excuses.

The key to hitting this goal?  Proactivity.  Having been in the royalty management business for the last 12 years, we know where customers are most likely to get tripped up.  And we have come to recognize certain patterns of behavior that can threaten a project’s success.  A customer focused organization, as we were, would be extremely responsive when these issues come up and resolve them quickly.  A customer committed organization would go a step further and pro-actively address these issues before they became issues.

For example, when a customer says that they will have reviewed a set of royalty statement tests prior to going live, and their due date is 3 weeks away, we continuously check in with them to ensure that they are making progress.  If they get tripped up or feel overwhelmed by other work, we hold their hand through the process.  Missing key dates hurts a project.  It does not matter whose fault it is – we are partners.  We need to be successful together.  Let’s not wait to point fingers.  Let’s just get it done well.

Second, in 2009, we decided to open our service offerings to smaller publishers.  Our impressive customer base (Taylor & Francis, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, etc.) has resulted in the evolution of the most sophisticated, robust royalty accounting platform available.  What if we could find a way to offer that same system to smaller publishers at an affordable price?  Welcome to RT Online!  By hosting our platform and standardizing our service, we have been able to offer cost effective, high value solutions to virtually any publisher.  The result:  we signed more customers in 2011 than in any prior year.  By a lot.

Third, we have continued to enhance our offerings to bring value to our customers.  We help our customers generate more revenue through our robust rights management module.  Customers can now easily sending dunning letters to past due accounts, and easily identify expiring yet profitable licenses.     We have also introduced powerful new reports and a new suite of statement templates.  This is the tip of the iceberg.

We have worked hard in 2011 to bring you the best royalty solution available.

Stay tuned for what’s ahead in 2012!

To that end, the committee has created a pilot program to test the transmission of royalties from rights sold.  Following is the official BISG document outlining the pilot:

PILOT PURPOSE

It is the consensus of the BISG Rights Committee that the digital transformation of the publishing industry has created a business need for more efficient management of intellectual property rights, and for a common language in which to conduct rights transactions. There are current pain points that need addressing, not least of which is the cumbersome process of royalty reporting, involving transmission of information in the form of non-standard documents and costly human data entry and error.

In addition, there are developing business opportunities in digital licensing that would benefit from a system-to-system form of communication for transacting rights at scale. On a more basic level, there are a great many new entrants into publishing, from single self-published authors to large tech companies, that could benefit from a controlled vocabulary for book-related rights.

The purpose of the Book Industry Study Group’s (BISG’s) Domestic Rights & Royalties Reporting Pilot (“Pilot”) is to create and test a standard message that will facilitate automated reporting of domestic royalty transactions, enabling more efficient transmission and ingestion of royalty-related information.

PILOT GOAL

The goal of the Pilot is to assess the challenges involved in enabling communication of rights and royalties information between proprietary management systems, for both print and digital content.

PILOT BACKGROUND

An urgent conversation about the need for a standardized way of communicating book rights information at large scale was already beginning to occur in an ad hoc fashion when publishers and other rights holders rushed to claim rights as part of opting in to the Google Book Settlement in June 2009. Those involved in the initial conversation, however, were not able to identify an adequate standard in use for book rights transactions, and participants agreed that, regardless of Google’s eventual role, the need for standardization was likely to grow because of digital transition complexities.

A proposal to address this issue was presented in September 2009 at BISG’s General BISAC Meeting. Based on this proposal, BISG members voted to revive the BISG Rights Committee with the following mandate:

To develop, maintain and advocate industry-wide best practices that support the standardized electronic transmission of a defined set of rights information between trading partners, now and in the future

Two working groups were formed within the Rights Committee to build out specifics. The Communications Working Group was charged with identifying a comprehensive set of rights transactions and a supporting controlled vocabulary, known as the Controlled Rights Vocabulary; the Beta Testing Working Group was charged with creating selected messaging and technical specifications for use in piloting messages for specific rights transactions, borrowing terminology from the Controlled Rights Vocabulary.

The Beta Testing Working Group decided that a Domestic Rights & Royalties Pilot was compelling for business reasons and also provided enough complexity to meaningfully test the Controlled Rights Vocabulary. Willing partners for the Pilot were found in MetaComet Systems and Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), who had already started engaging in a similar endeavor on behalf of a mutual customer. It is likely that only a modest amount of additional effort would be required to manage these transactions using a BISG-created standard message.

NEXT STEPS

International standards body EDItEUR created an outline of the proposed data elements and logic for use in generic rights and royalty transactions, titled Standardized Format for Rights & Royalties Reporting (drafted in February 2011 and included as Appendix A of this document). This outline was designed to be used as the foundation for communication between proprietary rights management systems, and elements from the outline will be used for the draft Pilot message.

For illustrative purposes, the data elements within this document include:

• Reports and payments
• Earnings statement, including
• Components of an earnings statement
• Agreement detail
• Advance/bonus detail
• Title detail
• Sales royalty detail
• Subsidiary earnings detail
• Amount payable detail
• Payment summary

The next step is to use this generic data model to develop the specifications and necessary data elements on which we can base a message tailored for this Domestic Rights & Royalty Reporting Pilot. From there, assessment needs to be made and documented as to the challenges inherent and the costs involved in incorporating this message into the Pilot participants’ systems.

Once the data elements are in place within the Pilot participants’ systems, the Pilot participants would then be expected to simulate real-world send/receive functionality of the Pilot message, and reports on functionality, problems, etc., would be generated and used to revise the Pilot message.

PROPOSED PROGRAM  TIMELINE

In order for the Pilot Program to proceed, further work on the Controlled Rights Vocabulary and the Standardized Format for Rights & Royalties Reporting is needed. In addition, development will be needed on the part of Copyright Clearance Center to create the message and by MetaComet Systems to ingest it.

The following program timeline is expected:

PROGRAM  PARTICIPATION 

This Pilot Program is open to BISG members and non-members alike. Companies interested in participating alongside Copyright Clearance Center and MetaComet Systems should contact BISG’s Associate Director:

Karen Forster, Associate Director
Book Industry Study Group, Inc.
370 Lexington Avenue, Suite 900
New York, NY 10017

(P) 646-336-7141

(F) 646-336-6214

As part of the Pilot Program, participating companies will simulate the actual data interfacing and send/receive process for foreign rights and royalties reporting in flat file (.xls) format.

The deadline for signing up is October 15, 2011.

PROGRAM BUDGET

The development costs for creating the proprietary message between MetaComet and CCC are currently being covered through their existing business relationship. Additional funds will be need for the following:

1. Refinement of the standard format
2. Development of pilot message specification
3. Implementation of necessary systems modification at both CCC and MetaComet

An estimate for costs will be provided as the Pilot moves forward.

ABOUT BISG

The Book Industry Study Group, Inc. (BISG) is the U.S. publishing industry’s leading trade association for policy, standards and research. A not-for-profit organization, it draws members from every sector of the book business and serves as a forum for managing change and enabling interaction among publishers, manufacturers, suppliers, wholesalers, retailers, librarians and others engaged in the business of print and electronic media.

In addition to creating and maintaining industry standards in areas such as product identification and description, bar coding and labeling, electronic commerce and digital content distribution, among other things, BISG gathers and analyzes statistical information about the entire U.S. book supply chain in order to evaluate and assess current industry trends.

Additional information on BISG may be found at www.bisg.org.

In going through them, we found many still relevant – perhaps even more relevant than ever.  Here are a few.

MetaComet Systems Releases Accounting Reports to Improve Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance

Thanks to the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, we had to become compliance specialists in a hurry!  This talks about some of the new features we released to help with this new era of royalty accounting.  In what is a positive development for investors, we find companies paying closer attention to rights and royalty controls than in the pre-SOX days.

MetaComet Systems Completes Taylor & Francis Group Phase I Implementation in Record Time

From our beginnings, we understood the importance of taking all possible friction out of the royalty software implementation process.  We heard of companies spending years implementing new royalty systems.  That just seemed wrong.  So we began addressing the issue with great new tools.  Here is one of our early examples.

It’s a good thing we did this, too, as it has been paying dividends ever since.  We can have companies up and running on our royalty management solutions in weeks.  We prefer about a 6-8 week time frame for most implementations (including data migration and acceptance testing), but we’ve done it in much less!

MetaComet Systems Announces Launch Date for RT Monitor

We have no doubt that the most important aspect to success in the royalty management business is customer service.  Making our customers successful has been a cornerstone of our evolution.  More than just meet expectations, we strive to exceed them.  To that end, in 2005, we launched RT Monitor – an automated system that continuously monitors the health of Royalty Tracker.  As soon as an issue is detected, our support departed is notified electronically and we respond before the customer is even aware of a potential problem (they are usually surprised to get our calls).

Stay tuned for a future version of “From the Archives”.