Costing a project

The next sub tab available to you is Costs, which opens another set of 3 sub-tabs for even further details. This will enable you to later analyse the profit and loss to ascertain whether the project is viable to move forward. The screen shot below shows the first sub-tab:

First you need to choose your Cost Schedule from the drop-down menu. You will have already populated the items in this menu when you configured your production manager module. For more information about establishing these default schedules, click here. Please note that the default schedule will already be populated in this field. Change it if you need to.

The next field is for the estimated number of pages for the manuscript. You can then establish the cost by using the Cost Calculator field. Bear in mind that the calculator will work either way - you can put the overall total cost of the manuscript and the system will work out the cost per page, or you can add the cost per page and the system will work out the overall cost.

Fill in the information about your Fixed costs, Marketing costs, ... the fields available to you are not mandatory. You can add whatever information is relevant to the costs of your company.

Below the permanent fields is a section with the heading General. In the image above, you can see several costs have been added here. This is where the system has a lot of flexibility as you can add as many costs as you need to. 

You can choose from the drop-down menu the Type of cost, whether it is printing, design, shipping etc. The information available to you in this drop-down menu was populated earlier when you configured your production module, establishing the tasks and costs of a print schedule. For more information about how to add these costs into the system, go here.

To add another cost, just click on the blue button: Add another cost.

When you are finished, click the Update button.

In the next sub-tab, you can fill in information about Advances and Royalties:

Just simply fill in the empty fields.  For Advances add Amount, select a Currency, enter the correct Exchange Rate and Date. Please note that the system will automatically generate the exchange rate as 1.0 unless you add different information.

To add more advances, click on Add another advances.

For Royalties, choose a Sales Type from the-drop down menu. Add  the Royalties % and check on the right circle for the Payment Type depending on whether the royalty percentage is counted from Net or Gross sales. To add more royalties, click on Add another royalty rate. 

The royalties calculation here is intended for a rough profit and loss (P&L), so it doesn't include escalation at the moment. You can really pare down your royalties costs within Royalties Manager, another module available within the Stison system. For more information, please see the documentation for Royalties Management.

To delete a row, click on the bin symbol to the left of the row you wish to delete. 

Click Update when you are finished.

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This section also has the space for information about Free copies and Wasteage, which is the last sub-tab available to you here.

Just fill in the number of free copies you are planning to give away, and the anticipated wasteage.

When you are finished, click on the Update tab.

All this info, along with the Sales Forecasts you entered earlier, will then be visible on the Profit and Loss screen, which is the next tab within Editorial.

 

Top Tip:

Please be aware that these are all predicted costings. Because of this, they remain within the Editorial module only. This means that if you move the item in the outputs into Title Management and Book Production, the costings as written in this module will not be transferred. You will need to start adding costs within Book Production.