Royalties Module Configuration - Bulk Upload Spreadsheet

Configuring Royalties Manager module can be a time-consuming process. To ensure that this can be accomplished in a clear and concise fashion, there is a bulk upload process that can take the time out of manually configuring the information.  

The spreadsheet for the upload process is available for download: Royalties Upload Template

There are six tabs to fill in, breaking down the data upload into subsections. We have also included examples of how this data may be look in a set of tabs towards the end of the document. 

Please note that, unfortunately, this upload is not something that you can do yourself, Stison will need to run the bulk upload of the data, and there is a charge for this. It is recommended that you agree this with Stison prior to filling out the spread sheet. Follow these steps, add your data accordingly, and then send the spreadsheet back to Stison. 

Warning

Please note that Author or Payee names included in the spread sheet that are not spelt exactly as they are in the system will cause duplicate entries.

There are 6 tabs of data that you will need to configure. They revolve around different aspects of the process: 

Configuration and Sales Types relate to the setup of your Royalty System within Stison.

Contract Details and Contract Rules detail the exact terms that can be found within each of your Royalty Contracts. 

Previous Data is all about historic data and enabling the system to start up from the exact point at which this system is taking over from your old system. 

Outstanding Income - Details about each payee, how much they have earnt on a title, and any monies that might be owing.

Configuration

This tab enables you to specify the regularity of your Royalty periods. It is possible that you have multiple Royalty periods, for example you could have some titles paid on a half yearly basis whilst the remainder are paid on an annual basis. If this is the case please create a single row for each schedule. 

A complete tab could look like this:

• Publisher Name - Please use the name of the organisation that is configured on your Stison system. 
• Config Name - Give the schedule a name. 
• Config Prefix - This is the label that will appear on your royalty statements, differentiating the payment schedule. In this example, A represents an Annual statement.
• Frequency - Input the number of months that will be included within the pay run. 
• Date of Last Run - Please list the date when your last royalty statements were run in your previous system. This will then trigger the system to add the Frequency figure from the previous column to the Date of Last Run in order to establish the next end date.
• Generate Empty - If you mark this as a Y, then you are stating that you would like empty statements run even if a title (or titles) have had no sales/royalties in the period.
• Generate Remittance - The system can generate remittance notices that can be sent out separately to the Royalty Statements. If you would like this enter Y else N. 

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Sales types

For Stison to process your sales for royalty statements, you will need to first configure the types of sales that your organisation has. This is what we call sales types. They will feed through to your royalty schedule in your contracts. They enable the system to know which category to place any sales. For example: Home Sales, Export Sales, Trade Sales, Book Club, etc. The rules that you specify in your Royalty Contracts are organised by sales type, amongst other factors.

Sales types are independent to product form; the relationship between the two occurs at work / title level. 

• Sales Type Name: In the example above, we've differentiated local sales (you may call this home sales, trade sales) from export sales. We have also shown you a third example: Ebook Sales. The sales types you record here will then populate a drop-down menu later in the system when you begin to manipulate the Royalties module with your sales data.
• Sales Type Code - Give the sales type a code prefix. Ensure that the code is useful to you and your colleagues, and relates in some way to the full name of the sales type.
• Copy Required -Are copies required for this sales type? This might not be the case if you are creating rights sales types. Alternatively, it will likely be required for traditional sales.
• Rights sale - Is this a rights sales type? This is used to organise information on your royalty statements.
• Firm Sale - If you do not allow returns on a sales type, please indicate that this is a firm sale type. 

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Contract Details

The contracts part of the system allows you to setup the main details about the contract, ie which book sit under this particular contract, who gets paid and how much. For titles with multiple authors, each author will have a line on the contract. Titles where payments an author has earnt are paid to multiple beneficiaries will also result in multiple lines on contract. Therefore it is likely you will see duplication in the spread sheet as below.

(To expand the example below, please select the image and a higher-resolution image will open in a new tab)

• Contract Number - You can use this to assign a contract number from a previous system or create a new number here. If you do not input a contract number, we will automatically generate this on upload.
• Config Name - Please indicate which royalty period this contract is assigned to.
• Contract Name.
• ISBNs on Contract - The ISBN13 for each product form included on the contract should be listed here, separating them each with a semicolon. 
• Author First Name & Surname - Think of this as a 'contributor' name, as this could relate to illustrators, editors, etc. This must be an exact match to the contact record in Stison.
• Payee First Name & Last Name - In some cases, the payee of the royalties may not actually be the contributor. If the payee is the same as the Author Name, please add the name here again. Make sure that it is spelled the same as it was the first time you input the information. If the payee is a different individual, then enter their name here. If the payee is an organisation then please add the name of the organisation in the First Name only and leave the last name blank. 
• %age Split - Each contributors total can only come to a maximum of 100%, and relates to the percentage that that person will receive of the royalties money earned per run. In an example we've provided in the spreadsheet, contributor Barry Keane's royalties earned are paid to two payees who receive 50% of the money. These payees are Monty Keane and Arianna King.
• Is payee an Organisation? Add a Y or N

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Contract rules

Each royalty contract is made up of a series of contract rules. These are designed to emulate what is written in your contract. So, "All Trade sales of  the Paperback sold in the UK market an amount of 10% of the net receipts received by the publisher" - would equate to a single line in the spread sheet. A rule that includes escalation might have more lines. For example "10% of net sales for the first 5000 copies and 15% thereafter", would require two lines in the spread sheet.

• Contract Name & Number: These must match with the contract details you uploaded within the Contract Details tab of the spreadsheet.
• Format: You should indicate here the product formats that the rule applies to, i.e. paperback / hardback / eBook …
• Author First Name & Surname: Please note that this field relates to any contributor for which royalties will be paid (not just an author).
• Sales Type: This relates to the sales type against which the calculation will be made, these will have been defined on Sales Type tab. A contributor may earn royalties on export sales, home sales, bookclub sales, etc, and each sales type will have a different royalty calculation (rule).
• First Break (%'age or Unit): It is possible for a royalty rule to combine two different break points; by number of units sold and percentage discount. If this is the case you will need to specify which break should be reviewed first. In almost all cases this will be Units first and discount second. In the unlikely event that you believe this should be discount please let us know. 

Note
The next two points relate to rules that have a break point included. If there is no break in the rule then you would leave both of these blank.

• %'age Break Start & End: For any rule that is based upon a discount rate these are the start points and end points of the break. For example one line may read from 0 - 55 (translates to up to 55% discount) the next line way read 56 and 70 (from 56% to 70 %) and then a final line would have  71 & 100 (from 71% - 100% discount). 
• Unit Break Start & End: Input the number where the unit break begins and ends. This works in the same fashion as a discount break with except that the start and end points are number of units sold. 
• Lump Sum:  In this instance the rule would imply that every time a sale is set against this rule a fixed sum is payable. 
• %'age Due: This is the rate payable when the a sale is passed against the rule. ie 10%.
• Net / Gross / Fixed Rate: Net = Net receipts received by the publisher, Gross indicates royalties are calculated on the RRP, and fixed rate would indicate a fixed amount per unit sold. 
• Influencer: Influencers enable the qyt of units sold from other ISBNs to impact the escalators in the current rule. IE sales of Vol 1 could increase the escalator for Vol 2 and vice versa. You will only need to add this information if the royalty contract is influenced by other titles. Please indicate which ISBN's are 'influenced' by the current rule, and where there are multiple, separate them with a semi-colon. Please also indicate which Sales Types are included here. For example, The HB Export Sales rule may be influenced by the PB Export Sales quantities, but not the PB home sales quantity. We need to be able to clearly distinguish this.
• Withholding Rate: (Or Returns Retention)This will be a percentage of the total royalties earned within the pay period that are held back from being paid to the payee for a specific period of time. Please note that this is different to a 'Withholding rate' that can be set in a payees contact record, which denotes a withholding tax that will be applied.
• Withholding Period: This is the period in which the withholding amount will be taken. Eg if a value of 12 were entered, the withholding rate would be applied in any statements generated 12 months after publication.
• Withholding Release: This indicates when the withholding amount will be released. Please enter a value indicating number of months after publication.
• Rolling Withholding: An amount withheld is predominantly only held back form the first royalty period. However sometimes this amount can be indefinite. So that at each royalty period the withheld amount is returned to the payee, and a new amount is withheld based on the royalties earnt in that period. To add this include a Y in this field else add an N.

(To expand the example below, please select the image and a higher-resolution image will open in a new tab)

The rules here are organised by Contract, Format, Contributor and Sales type. Take the example of C001. The only contributor is Corrina, and she has 3 rules. 1 for Local sales of PB and HB, 1 for Export Sales of PB and HB, and one for Ebook Sales of the Ebook. Each line (lines 2-4) represent a new rule. 

Line	Description
2	Contract for PB and HB is 15% of Net sale value for all local sales with 20% of revenue being held as a returns retenion value for any statement generated in the first 12 Months after publication. This value will be released after 24 months.
3	Contract for PB and HB is 10% of Net sale value for all Export sales with 20% of revenue being held as a returns retenion value for any statement generated in the first 12 Months after publication. This value will be released after 24 months.
4	Contract for Ebooks is 25% of Net sale value for all EBook sales, with 10% of revenue being held as a returns retention value for any statement generated in the first 12 months after publication. This will be released in the first subsequent period.
5	Contract for PB is 8% of net sale amount for the first 5000 units sold in the Local market
6	Contract for PB is 10% of net sale amount for 5001 units and above sold in the Local market
7	Contract for PB is 6% of net sale amount to all units sold in the export market
8	Contract for PB & HB is 5% or RRP for 1st 5000 units sold at a discount of less than 50% of rrp
9	Contract for PB & HB is 6% or RRP for 2nd 5000 units sold at a discount of less than 50% of rrp
10	Contract for PB & HB is 7.5% or RRP for 2nd 10001 units and above sold at a discount of less than 50% of RRP
11	Contract for PB &HB for 10% of net sale amount for all copes sold at a discount of between 50% and 80% of rrp.
12	Contract for PB & HB for 0% for all copies sold at a discount of over 80% of rrp.

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Previous Data

It is likely that you will be using the Stison Royalties module after having previously used a different system. If this is the case, then there will be historical data for your titles that you'll want to maintain/take into account. 

In this tab, we are looking for information about the sales of your products to date. For example, if your contracts include escalation based on units, we will need to know how many copies of a product have been sold to date. This information is essential to ensure that, when Stison calculates your next royalty run, it has all of the information that it needs to do so. Once entered into Stison, this information cannot be edited. 

Additionally, this is an opportunity to enter into Stison an overview of your products historic sales data. Whilst not always essential for calculating royalties, this can help to have a more comprehensive sales picture logged in Stison, allowing you to more comprehensively review the success of your products.

This will be lump sums per title rather than break downs of who your titles were sold to previously and for how much. 

• Contract Number & Name: These must match with the contract details you uploaded within the Contract Details tab of the spreadsheet.
• ISBN: This will be the ISBN of the product to which these sales or values correspond.
• Sales Type: This will be the Sales types that the sales correspond to - if your historic data does not provide this then you can put all sales against a single sales type. 
• Units Sold: The number of units sold, this is very important if there is an escalator involved.
• Net Value: The net value of all sales to date.
• Gross Value: The gross value of all sales to date. 
• Percentage: This is an approximate value to ensure that the units get placed in the correct percentage break. This is only essential when royalties are calculated based on the number of sales at a particular discount rate. 
• Escalated Units: If units are impacted by the sales of other volumes or product forms that do not / will not exist in Stison, then adding the value of these escalations is important for configuration of the system. For example, if you are entering the details for a second edition, but you do not have the first edition in the system, and the sales of the first edition affect the escalation in the royalties of the second edition, you will need to enter the units sold for the first edition here. 

In the example below, you will see that for Title 2, the historical data shows they sold 3,541 units since publication date. With this information uploaded onto the system, Title 2's royalties records will begin from 3,541 rather than 0. For Title 3, you can see that there are three types of escalation points, and so the total figures have been laid out separately against each escalation point.

Line	Description
2	Title 2 has sold 3541 units in 'Local Sales', for a net value of 8153.27, and a gross value of 9512.99. There are also 154 copies sold of a product that does not exist in Stison, that must be considered when calculating which royalty rule to use for future sales.
3-5	The sales of title 3 have been broken down according to the discount applied to these sales. This is necessary when the royalty rule takes into account the units sold of a product at a particular discount, to calculate the rate applied. Here, there have been 5874 sales at 0-50% discount, 4586 sales at 50.01-80% discount, and 1541 sales at 80.01% discount and above.

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Outstanding Income

If you are switching over to the Stison Royalties module from a previous system, there are very likely balances held against your contracts that need to be carried over. As with the Previous Data tab, this is essential to ensure accurate statement generation from Stison for contracts that are already live. This information also cannot be edited once your system is live.

In this tab, you can enter this information; are there unearned advances left, are you due to release a returns retention value, is there an unpaid balance that an author is owed? You also have the opportunity to indicate the royalties earned to date for each contributor on a contract, which will in turn allow for more comprehensive royalty report in the future.

• Contract Number and Contract Name: These must match with the contract details you uploaded within the Contract Details tab of the spreadsheet.
• ISBN:  The isbn of the title that the balances relate to.
• Author and Payee First Names & Surname: The author and payee names, please note that these should be exactly the same as the Contract Details tab. 
• Royalties Earnt: This is the sum total of the Royalties that this payee has earned from this ISBN to date. 
• Balance Due: Any outstanding balance that is due to the Payee for this ISBN. This may be because of not meeting a minimum payment. (This should not include any values in the Returns Retention Column).
• Returns Retention: The value of any royalties that have been retained from a previous period. 
• Returns Retention Release Date: Where your publisher is currently holding a returns retention amount, the date on which this will be released is required.
• Unearned Advance: Any unearned advance that is attached to this ISBN.

(To expand the example below, please select the image and a higher-resolution image will open in a new tab)

Line	Description
2	Contract C001, Corrina Wise has earned 400 worth of royalties to date, and the publisher is currently holding 175 worth of returns retention, which is due to be released on 01/01/2025.
3	Contract C002, Adrian Carrol has an unearned advance amount remaining of 750.
4-5	Contract C003, Barry Keane has 2 payees, and both payees are owed 75 by the publisher as of the most recent period. The first statement generated from Stison will indicate this.

Once this spread sheet has been completed then Stison will should be able to upload your Royalty Data. 

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