Friday, May 21, 2010

Complex royalties like physical vs. digital with stages

In our ongoing quest to make DashBook the best that it can be, we have released DashBook v4.1 that continues to extend the ease at which one can manage complex royalty contracts.

Version 4 added Generic Royalties, so that one can create only a single or handful of royalty calculation styles and apply them across many products (books, tracks, CDs, films, apps, etc.) and the entities needing to be paid (artists, authors, publishers, etc.).  With a few more extensions, v4.1 is even more powerful!

v4.1 now has the ability to use Generic Royalties to describe sales channels (different percents based on how a product was sold) and breakpoints (different percents based on the staging or thresholds of sales).

As an example, it is very popular in the music business to pay different royalties on the same work based on what happened, such as the physical sale of a CD, the purchase and digital download of a single track or song, the streaming of a song, or a performance.  DashBook has been able to handle this since its inception, but now it is even easier.

In prior versions, if you had certain sale thresholds (breakpoints) to meet, like a different percent for the first thousand units, that style was incompatible with a different royalty based on sales channels.  Now you can easily have both at the same time.

From the product screen, you can simply reference that a particular royalty holder (author) uses a particular royalty agreement.  Now you can restrict that royalty agreement to a particular sales channel, and that royalty agreement can already be making breakpoint decisions based upon sales levels.  So you'll be able to reference a royalty agreement paying on mechanicals for only physical sales, and another agreement staging the percentage paid but only on digital -- well, whatever your contract requires.

I know that what I am talking about will not be easily absorbed by most readers, but believe me, this is huge.  Contact us at DashBook, and we will help you setup your royalty system so that it handles everything you need, while making it very easy to maintain and extend.

It looks like we need more instructional videos!