PayPal discontinues MassPay

Normally when someone who is evaluating DashBook asks why they cannot send out royalty payments directly via PayPal through our software, it is because they simply did not set it up.  It is a very quick and easy procedure consisting of logging in to one's PayPal account and requesting API signature information which provides the credentials that DashBook needs to communicate on behalf of their business account.

PayPal's MassPay does not work with personal accounts, so an upgrade to Business or Premier might be required.  Why does DashBook use PayPal's MassPay system for electronic payments?  MassPay is a great way to handle paying a handful or hundreds of royalty holders at once.  It also fits nicely in the business model, as the sender pays a fee that is comparable to or cheaper than mailing costs, and the recipient receives the full funds without additional fees removed.  Other methods of PayPal payments would have the royalty holder receive less than the royalties due.

PayPal MassPay has been a great system for DashBook users, who are primarily book publishers and music labels right now, although of course our system handles many more businesses interested in tracking royalties and licenses.  It is very simple and easy.  One screen shows all of the royalty amounts owed for the period chosen, and one click can fire off all of the payments and record that information into DashBook for account balance purposes.  Life is good.

So when one of our new book publishers started asking about her inability to use PayPal, the answer seemed obvious.  "Go to this PayPal website page to get your account information; paste it here in DashBook."  Ah, but not so easy this time! Her PayPal system didn't have MassPay activated, and calls to PayPal resulted in her telling us that PayPal has discontinued MassPay for all but huge corporations.

What?  Isn't PayPal for the little guys who don't already have large systems setup?  If your company is already large, wouldn't you have EFTS (Electronic Funds Transfer - like direct deposit) to handle all your needs?

Well, after spending hours on the phone with various PayPal personnel, it looks bad.  Whether their decision is due to "abuses" or "high risk" (their terms), they have indeed disabled MassPay from the majority of their accounts while leaving it intact for a handful of large multinational corporations.

This is huge news.  Why isn't there outrage everywhere today?  Maybe because they did this months ago, and perhaps our clients that use this feature only pay quarterly or semi-annually, etc.
[Edit:  It appears those using it regularly have been grandfathered.]

What did PayPal recommend that we do?  Trash our MassPay API program code, and rewrite it for their alternative Adaptive Payments style, which puts the burden on the recipient for the fees -- and those fees are much higher than the $1 USD cap that MassPay has.

If you've used MassPay, contact PayPal immediately to see if they will re-instate your account. [Edit: First go to your account, select Send Payment, select MassPay, and see if yours is disabled.]

If you have experiences about this, please reply to this post so that we can all learn.  Unfortunately, change is not always for the better.

Streams versus downloads

With DashBook, it is easy to setup one set of products that receive different types of royalties depending on the product's usage by using our Sales Channels feature.

For example, let's say that you pay 75% of U.S. mechanical for a particular song.  For a 5 minute song, a 9.1 cent mechanical would be $0.06825.  But if the transaction report you receive also has streams of this song paying you 2 cents, you'd lose over twice as much as you receive by paying mechanicals on streams!

So, in DashBook, you use Sales Channels such as "Sales" vs "Streams" to distinguish what happened with a song.  Your royalty arrangement can then be set to 75% mechanical for all transactions on a "Sales" order, but 50% on all transactions on a "Streams" order.

So whether you are paying songwriters, publishers, or the artists themselves, DashBook can handle it.

Music Master Royalties

DashBook 4.5 is on our website available for downloading.  One of the extensions of this version is the ability to specify a single master share percentage on a product.  Each royalty arrangement connected to this product will be multiplied times this master share percent.

This means that you can create fewer royalty arrangements for artists or royalty holders who have songs on an album, of which you may not even know how many other tracks are there.  If your song's share is 10% of an album, you can simply create the album product with a Master Share of 10% and point the royalty to a generic royalty for your artist.  That generic might be, say 20%, resulting in .2*.1= 2% royalties for your artist.

You no longer need to multiply the master share by the artist percent, as DashBook v4.5 can now do that for you.  By using a generic arrangement of 20%, that royalty can be used on many different products, each having a different master share.

We continue to enhance DashBook to make your work easier.  Please let us know how we can help you!

Royalties for iPhone Developers

I have just learned that Michel Kripalani of Oceanhouse Media will be giving a talk this Friday at MacWorld 2010 on the subject of "Building an iPhone Publishing House."  What makes this session particularly interesting to me is that he will be discussing the securing of intellectual property such as content to quickly bring value to one's App, and after his exhaustive research of software to handle tracking such license payment requirements, Oceanhouse Media chose DashBook!

When Michel first approached us about using DashBook, we had only recently introduced our version 3 that supported importing sales reports to use as the data for royalty calculations.  However, we did not yet have an import for Apple's iTunes sales reports.  With Michel's input and the use of DashBook's extensible import mapping architecture, we were able to quickly send him an import map that allowed his trial version to import his sales from each of the seven regional reports that Apple generated.  Needless to say, he was impressed with our rapid response.  Of course, already having an import that could convert currencies, along with the existing royalty calculation abilities that supported multiple payees per product helped, too!

After Oceanhouse Media purchased a license to DashBook and began using it, they continued to offer great suggestions to refine DashBook for the market of iPhone and iPod (and now iPad) developers.  One of his requests was the ability to easily specify the deposit fees that were charged, and automatically spread those costs across the apps sold in that period and region.  Fortunately, DashBook already had an option to reduce the amount received by various costs, so he was able to bend it to his will.  However, DashBook v4 will soon be released which will provide a simple entry during import to a cost item whose name will makes sense - "Payment Fees."

We are very happy to work with companies such as Oceanhouse Media who seek perfection in their operations.  DashBook is a powerful system built on a flexible architecture, and our team is committed to providing the best system there is.

Thanks to everyone!

Music royalties for publishers and artists (percentage of sale price)

Two blog entries ago, I wrote an article about using DashBook for U.S. mechanical rights interest calculations. With a little setup, DashBook makes this calculation automatic as you continue to sell, even if the rates change.

This time, I'll briefly discuss a very similar feature now -- the ability to specify a royalty on a track as a percentage of the sale amount. By setting up the royalty agreement as a percentage of the sale price, typically of net sales, DashBook will calculate the royalties using this percentage each time that this track is directly sold.

But what if the album is sold?

Well, DashBook now has the ability to use the price of the album (gross or net) divided by the number of tracks on that album -- automatically!

To see how to enter album products that contain tracks, I recommend that previous post.

There is one more thing about handling music or other royalties that I don't recall writing about:  advances and recoupments.  That'll be the subject of a future article, but feel free to email us if you'd like to know more about it now.

And don't forget that you can download a free trial of DashBook here.

Automating publishing with a barcode scanner

We continue to receive compliments on our DashBook royalty software from companies seeking to improve the management of their publishing businesses. Sometimes these companies have little or nothing to do with our original market of small book publishers, but due to DashBook's amazing feature set and ease of use, they realize that it is the best product for them.

Recently we were asked about barcode support for an organization needing to track their products from their warehouses. DashBook already supports adding to and shipping from multiple warehouses, so that is not an issue. But what about barcode scanners?

As it turns out, barcode scanners are little more than machines that read code and type what they see as if a human had typed it using the keyboard. Simply plug in a USB barcode scanner, and the operating system will detect it and configure itself to use it. Here are a couple of things I played with using our new barcode scanner:

Within DashBook, I created a new order. Because our Simple order style does not show product codes, I clicked the Advanced tab to go to Order Detail. I clicked into the ISBN/Product Code field, grabbed a book off of my shelf, and scanned it. DashBook immediately created an order line with that product, filling out the price and presumed quantity of 1, which can readily be changed. Because the scanner automatically added a cr/lf (carriage return/linefeed), DashBook was ready for the next book. Just by scanning one book after another, an entire order can be filled.

My next test was to go to the product section of DashBook to create products. I just clicked the + sign to create a product, and DashBook popped open an ISBN window before the main product form. I then scanned multiple books, which automatically typed their ISBNs into this window -- all in a nice column because of the "returns" at the end of each code. When I pressed the OK button on that window, DashBook looked up these ISBN codes on the internet, and created each of the product records, automatically filling in the book titles, summary description, and authors.

Wow. I love automation!