The TBS royalty system takes feeds from the Vista distribution system, enabling most of the processing to work automatically. Title information is maintained via the link and sales information is passed to the royalty system at the appropriate time. The publisher is then only responsible for maintaining contracts (rules & formula - how much is paid in royalties depending on the type of transaction, discount, market, etc) and ledger entries. e.g. advances.
The system can be set up to pay royalties quarterly, half yearly or yearly and offers a wide variety of reports to manage the royalty function.
Draft calculation runs are available to ensure completeness of data before committing to a final royalty run. Titles can be reprocessed when required to allow calculations to be re-done if the rules and formula change.
The system automatically handles VAT, tax and returns retention calculations.
Statements can be created with the publisher’s logo and author payments provided in an electronic format, to allow ease of processing through the publisher's accounts system.
The TBS royalty system is fully hosted by TBS. Only a VPN connection is required from client’s offices.
Summary of the features:
- Providing a direct interface with Order Processing (which allows automatic updating of sales details)
- Sales editing to enable new sales lines (created outside the system) to be added manually
- Storing up to 20 rules for accruing sales details per title. This means sales can be accrued according to the market sector or sales type; for example, book club sales
- Calculating royalties on different methods, e.g. published price, net receipts (price received)
- Automatically calculating value added and income tax, where applicable
- Linking royalty statements by ISBN, if required
- Enabling advances and other transactions to be posted directly to the royalty ledger
- Holding up to 5 break quantities and differential percentages for calculating royalties
- Combining sales accrued under different rules for calculation of royalty break points, if required
- Carrying forward a percentage of royalties earned, to be held in case of future returns
- Using flexible royalty periods; choose from, for example, M (monthly), Q (quarterly), H (half-yearly), and Y (yearly)
- Carrying forward unearned balances to the next royalty period
- Identifying sales for which royalties cannot be calculated as either manual (the calculation is too complex to be handled automatically) or ex-royalty (there are no royalties due on those sales)