Contracts & royalties

A contract records who holds which rights in which work, and what is paid for them. The module manages acquisition and sales contracts with their term, financial conditions and scope of rights, links them to the partners from the CRM and to work and title data, and settles the royalties on that basis.

The contract list shows the total, the active contracts and those about to expire, coloring whatever ends within 90 or 30 days. The contract itself is divided into tabs: master data, partners, rights, titles, documents, dates, royalties, licensing income, settlement and postings. The workflow runs alongside on the right, asking for the stages from signature through to delivery of the manuscript.

Participants are added with their role and royalty share (author, co-author, editor, translator, illustrator, agency), together with the voucher copies per edition, which reappear as a contractually agreed quantity in complimentary copies. The rights list primary and subsidiary rights with territory, languages, exclusivity and whether they can be offset; a template per contract type pre-fills them. The title assignment states from when and until when settlement applies and at which starting sales figure, and allows title-specific shares that override the contract-wide share.

The royalty lines carry the model: sales-based royalties with scales running from copy to copy, as a percentage or per copy; advance payments with a due date and a traffic light showing whether the advance is paid, part-paid or overdue; flat fees and contract-for-work installments with their trigger. Every line brings its own posting account with it.

Settlement happens per period: generate a preview, accept it, check it, post it. The document number is created at the checking stage, the document itself as HTML and PDF. The author account shows the opening balance, the gross entitlement and the closing balance; a reversal creates the counter-posting, either as a reclaim or as an offset in the next period. And anyone who does not want to go contract by contract starts a settlement run.

Around the contracts lie the exploitation processes: licensing income from collecting society distributions and from other publishers, also as a bulk import that assigns the lines to contracts and works by itself; registrations with collecting societies including their responses; work registration as CWR or IWA-XML; and the counting marks and reports to VG Wort. The income is reflected in reporting; advances paid and their drafts sit with incoming invoices.

Reprint requests follow a route of their own. When a third party wants to reprint a text, it becomes a case with a status flow. A per-character rate prices the request, the invoice is created through Orders & invoices, and the income flows into the same distribution to the contracting parties as any other licensing income. There is no second settlement system beside it. A voucher copy can be requested directly from the inquiry, and the analysis per contract separates income already posted from income approved but still outstanding.

And the papers themselves come from document templates. For each contract type it is recorded which template applies – either set in the form editor or uploaded as a file edited in Word, which the system fills with the contract data and converts to PDF. Before creation, a preview shows what the document will look like and warns which placeholders would remain empty. The documents produced are then attached to the contract, with template, version, language, creator and timestamp. Which field names to use in Word is set out in a searchable reference that can also be printed.