Knowing When and How to Make the Switch
Licensors and licensees alike are exploring new and innovative ways to monetize licensed property. This is leading to more and more complex agreements and royalty structures. If your royalty management software doesn’t have continued investment and advancement, it may be impeding your company’s growth. A modern royalty management platform leverages AI, automation, integration, and advanced workflows to go beyond royalties, addressing the entire licensing lifecycle, from deals to rights, royalties, accounting, forecasting, product approvals, analytics, and more. This allows you to reallocate resource time from administrative tasks to creating and selling. In this article, we outline telltale signs that it might be time to change your royalty management software, and what to look for in a modern system to boost your competitive edge. As we mentioned in our article How to Navigate Licensing Amid Tariff Uncertainty, this type of technology investment is arguably the very thing licensing companies need to counteract today’s volatile landscape.
Explore modern, AI-powered royalty management software. Schedule a session
7 Signs You Should Consider a Change
- You’re still using manual processes for licensing management.
If the software you’re using for licensing management still requires you to rely on spreadsheets or legacy systems that don’t do the whole job, it’s time to start looking around. Manual data entry is inefficient and frequently leads to errors—which can come at a hefty cost if royalty calculations are off. An advanced system should do all the heavy lifting for you, diminishing the administrative burden of routine and repetitive tasks from hours or days to minutes.
- Your royalty management software doesn’t integrate into your processes or technology landscape.
Seamless integration with your ERP financials for accounts payable, accounts receivable, and general ledger saves time and mitigates the risk of costly administrative errors. You should be able to generate royalty statements, audit reports, forecasts, and analytics with the click of a button. With a robust licensing management system, implementing revenue or expense recognition policies, truing up forecasts to actuals, managing accruals, and gaining business insights based on trend analysis, predictive modeling, and machine learning should all be at your fingertips.
- You’ve had to pay the price for inaccurate royalty reporting or compliance challenges.
“Paying the price” could show up in many forms. If you’re a licensee, perhaps you had to pay for territory violations or didn’t hit your minimum guarantees. Maybe you didn’t meet your marketing spend or products aren’t living up to agreed-upon quality standards. Perhaps you’ve been squirreling much-needed funds away in a contingency fund or are intentionally overpaying royalties. Or maybe you’ve had to spend six months chasing down documentation to defend a licensing audit. If you’re a licensor, you may be spending excessive time validating that licensees are satisfying agreement terms. In either case, these challenges are attributable to a lack of visibility into your licensing operations.
- Your royalty management software isn’t able to scale for growth.
The ever-increasing volume of data and complexity of agreements may be bogging your current software down. After all, it wasn’t purchased with this level of activity in mind. Yet if your software can’t efficiently and effectively manage your current workload, it’s limiting revenue opportunities and hindering growth. Scalability is just one advantage of transitioning to a cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. Continual enhancements and security updates, built-in support and maintenance, backup and disaster recovery, and new technologies like AI and machine learning reduce costs and boost your competitive advantage.
- Your software’s enhancement roadmap has come to a halt.
If your royalty management software has been around for decades, but product enhancements and advancements are stalled or even cancelled, you are left with a legacy system that doesn’t have the functionality to support increasing licensing complexities. It’s important to have a software partner that understands your business and invests in continual feature and functionality enhancements to address your evolving needs.
- You’re being forced to migrate to a platform you didn’t choose.
It’s highly likely that when you invested in your current royalty management software, you did extensive due diligence. You compared feature and function. You evaluated the software solution’s fit with your organization’s needs. You confirmed integration and interoperability with your existing IT environment and business processes. You trained up your team. And now you’re being forced to migrate to software that doesn’t work in the same way and doesn’t offer the same advantages. That means another integration for your IT team, a learning curve for your users, and possibly losing functionality that added significant value to your business. If migration is inevitable, t might be time to consider your options.
- Getting software support is like pulling teeth.
If you’re working with software you’ve had for a while, support may be sunsetting for certain features or even your entire product as your provider phases it out for a “new and improved” version. Vendors may even start imposing support surcharges to retain certain features and functionality. These are all indications of an uncertain future for your software. For business continuity, it’s important that your licensing management system performs like clockwork. And when it doesn’t, you need a responsive partner that will help without you having to jump through hoops.
Several of these shortcomings are caused by acquisitions. Companies snap up other companies in their general market too quickly, without spending the time to optimize and integrate the functionality. This often leads to cobbled-together solutions, clunky processes, reduced feature sets, and suboptimal support from staff whose expertise with your specific technology may be diminishing. If you’re experiencing any of these setbacks, it’s time to start looking for a solution that meets your licensing needs now and future-proofs your business for what’s to come.
See how FADEL’s solutions solve these challenges. Schedule a session
Benefits of upgrading your rights and royalty management software
- Support company growth A scalable, cloud-based solution that has the features, functionality, and compatibility to seamlessly integrate into your environment and support the complexities of modern licensing terms will drive expansion—and even exponential growth.
- Optimize operations Eliminate the errors, frustrations, and overhead of manual tasks. Automate your licensing operations from end to end with software that supports inbound and outbound licensing across the entire deal lifecycle on a single, AI-driven platform.
- Improve licensee/licensor partnerships Build stronger partnerships with complete transparency and the confidence that your licensee or licensor counterpart has the operational infrastructure in place for timely and accurate delivery on deal terms.
What to look for in a modern rights and royalty management platform
- Automation, AI, and machine learning
Automating calculations and processes reduces manual tasks and minimizes errors, saving time for your team. AI provides trend analysis and predictive analytics that help you make informed decisions, while machine learning continually improves processes based on how you work. If a software vendor has not already incorporated AI and ML into their royalty management software, they are already behind the curve.
- Real-time reporting
Numbers from last quarter or last month don’t serve your business to the degree they should. When you’re looking under the hood, you want instant access to royalty calculations, sales data, and market trends—and you want to be able to produce them in the format you need. Reporting transparency and adherence to licensor standards strengthen the licensee/licensor relationship, creating more partnership opportunities.
- Assured compliance
Tracking and documentation that support adherence to contract terms and payments minimize the risk of audits and disputes. Should licensors require routine audits, the ability to easily output the details you need to defend an audit from your royalty management system can save you months of time. Similarly, licensors gain confidence when reports and documentation are provided in a format that they recognize and can easily process.
- Data-driven insights
Advanced analytics will help you make informed decisions that drive growth for your business. Analytics can give you the information you need to better negotiate licensing agreements, support smarter renewal strategies, and increase the accuracy of your forecasts for better cash flow planning, inventory management, and risk mitigation.
- Streamlined collaboration
When licensees and licensors can collaborate on a unified platform, it streamlines information sharing and simplifies communication between stakeholders. If they’re using the same platform, it makes it even easier to streamline processes. Consider a solution that supports both inbound and outbound licensing. This will also leave you open to further opportunities.
Upgrade your royalty management software with FADEL and get all the features you need in one platform
FADEL offers a sustainable solution—rights and royalty management software that provides a speedy ROI to quickly pay for itself, freeing up capital for creation and innovation.
FADEL has maintained a laser-like focus on rights and royalty management software since we pioneered the field more than 20 years ago. Our flagship product, IPM Suite rights and royalty management software for enterprise licensors and licensees, is a powerful, comprehensive solution to manage contracts, rights, and royalty payments.
Working side-by-side with our clients, we have since tailored solutions for more specific needs, expanding our portfolio with LicenSee to manage royalties for small-to-midsize licensees and IPM Suite Publishing Edition that helps publishers navigate complex author, syndication, and licensing contracts. Our solutions are priced so companies of any size can take advantage of our unparalleled features, and then scale as they grow.
Our continual investment and R&D in the rights and royalty management realm have resulted in features that other software providers simply don’t have, including:
- Deal management to navigate the negotiation, creation, renewals, and amendments of even the most complex contract terms.
- Out-of-the-box royalty reporting with templates that adhere to the formats and standards of top licensors, including Disney, Hasbro, Marvel, Warner Brothers, Mattel, Bandai Namco, and more.
- Robust reporting and AI-powered analytics that can automatically output forecasting and show performance of top licensees in a simple, dashboard view.
- Inbound and outbound licensing on a single platform to streamline communication between licensees and licensors as well as support companies that dabble in both.
- Complete ERP financials integration for AP, AR, and General Ledger to support the complex accounting that accompanies complex contracts.
…and so much more.
We service some of the world’s largest licensors, and our trusted, award-winning platform makes billions of calculations annually — covering 28% of all consumer products licensing royalties processed worldwide.
Pick your poison and reach out to us today for a demo.
Simplify Licensing Agreements and Maximize Revenue With FADEL
FADEL plays a critical behind-the-scenes role in helping major brands manage licensing agreements with greater efficiency, accuracy, and profitability.
With over 20 years of expertise, FADEL specializes in automating the complex processes of rights management, royalty tracking, and brand compliance.
From verifying that licensed content is used only within approved territories to calculating royalties down to the last cent, FADEL’s cloud-based solutions provide the infrastructure that keeps global licensing operations running smoothly.
Our solutions include:
- Brand Vision: A brand protection solution that helps ensure compliance with licensing agreements by providing clear visibility into rights, talent, and usage terms. It safeguards brand integrity while streamlining marketing and product development workflows.
- IPM Suite (Intellectual Property Management): An end-to-end IP management software for managing rights, royalties, and licensing agreements across complex ecosystems. It enables brands, licensors, and licensees to automate workflows, ensure compliance, and maximize the value of their intellectual property.
- LicenSee: A royalty management software designed to help licensees manage licensed products with improved accuracy, transparency, and compliance. It streamlines royalty reporting, monitors usage rights, and ensures alignment with agreement terms.
- PictureDesk: A media asset management software that oversees image licensing, rights, and usage across the organization to ensure consistent and compliant visual asset deployment.
- AI-Powered Business Insights & Content Tracking: Streamline licensing, royalties, and content compliance with AI and automation.
Trusted across industries, FADEL enables brands to minimize risk, ensure legal compliance, and maximize the value of their intellectual property.