Later this month, MetaComet Systems will release version 2012.2 of Royalty Tracker which introduces yet more enhancements to the world’s most advanced royalty accounting management tool.

In a prior royalty community post, we discussed our new Statement Emailing Capability, also included in the 2012.2 release.  In today’s post, we will discuss another great feature of this release:  Kit and Project management enhancements.

Kits and projects play an important role in many organizations’ royalty operations.  In their most basic form, the two are very similar:  A grouping of products or content to create a new product.

In the retail world, organizations often sell “kits” of products to retailers.  In this context, a kit is a shipment of products grouped together for the purpose of simplifying ordering between the seller and the retailer. These kits are given unique ID’s, just as with any other products.

When a kit is sold, fulfillment systems typically report the sale of the kit rather than the components.  Your royalty system must therefore break out the components of the kit and apply the revenue proportionally to each.

Similarly, a “project” is also a grouping of multiple items from multiple contracts.  An example might be a music compilation, such as music from the 60’s.  Each component of the project may have its own royalty rules, and your royalty system must proportionally allocate the revenues to each.  Another example might be an anthology of essays.

As with kits, sales of projects are reported at the project level and revenue must be allocated to the components.

Royalty Tracker has long supported kits.  With this new release, we have added several new features to enhance this functionality and apply it to “projects” as well.  Specifically, kits can now be created and modified directly from the Royalty Tracker interface (previously, it was possible through an API).  Additionally, the proportion of revenue to allocate to each component of the kit or project is adjustable.  Previously, Royalty Tracker by default used a weighted average of each component’s list price to allocate revenues.  In RT 2012.2, users can specify any proportions for  allocating revenue to components.