Summary

Easy Royalties reduces the time required to process royalties statements and track your intellectual property. It ensures that you present a professional image to you royalty recipients be they authors or artists.

This royalty software is an affordable stand alone application that;

1. Manages royalty contracts
2. Generates royalty statements
3. Imports sales, authors and titles from an Excel 2003 or comma delimited file
4. Can import sales data from Intuit’s Quickbooks
5. Tracks title information – such as publication date, subject, imprint, and more
6. Tracks author information – such as name, address, telephone, email, biography, and more
7. Maintains a database of prior royalty statements that can be retrieved and printed on demand
8. Generates sales reports by subject category, series and product line
9. Integrates with Thats Rights! to provide publishers with rights management functionality.

Our View

As a book publisher you don’t want spend more than 5% of your annual royalty expense on royalty software. If your annual royalty expense is $500,000 the most that you should spend on royalty software is $25K. If your annual royalty expense is $50,000 you should spend no more than $2,500 on royalty software. The price of Easy royalties ranges from $500 to $10,000.

We recommend Easy Royalties to small to medium sized book publishers and art museums looking for a low priced royalty solution that can handle complex royalty contracts.

The major drawback to this product is that it’s a relatively new product produced by a three person company located in the United Kingdom. As such it does not offer the same level of documentation, technical support and functionality offered by larger software vendors such as ACUMEN, Anko, Bradbury Phillips, the Media Services Group, Klopotek or Publishing Technology. Furthermore, as it runs off a Microsoft Access database it is limited to 5 concurrent users; i.e. no more than 5 users can access the software at the same time.

Nor does it does offer the scalability offered by solutions running on a MS-SQL or Oracle database engine. This means that it can handle about 5,000 royalty statements per period, not the 20,000 to 100,000+ statements per period required by larger publishers.

We favor the powerful and time tested solutions that the larger vendors offer; however, small organizations can’t afford them. That said, Easy Royalties offers several advantages;

Advantage 1 – Affordable

Prices range from $500 to $10,000 USD for a single user user version of the software. Software support is free.

Competitive products often require their customers to purchase a maintance contract that costs 15% to 22% of the software cost. Over four years Easy Royalties will save you $6,000 to $40,000 or more in software maintenance fees.

Advantage 2 – Easy to Use

Easy Royalties is an easy to use Windows applications written in Microsoft Access.

Advantage 3 – Software Customization

In our experience, the developer of Easy Royalties is often willing to customize the software at little or no charge to the user. This means that software customization that would cost thousands of dollars from another vendor is often provided at no charge.

Advantage 4 – Frequent Software Updates

The software is frequently updated; usually monthly, with new functionality based on user requests. Updates to the current version are free.

Advantage 5 – Handles complex royalty contracts

Easy Royalties can handle very complex royalty contracts. Small publishers should have simple royalty contracts, but many don’t. Easy Royalties can handle; within one contract, different royalty rates for foreign sales, consumer sales, on-line sales, wholesale sales, sales at below cost, book club sales, ebook sales, and more along with the option of rate escalators and charging the royalty based on list price, gross, net and net after deducting marketing costs. These are just a few examples.

Software Cost

The price of this royalty software ranges from $500 for a 50 title version to $10,000 for an unlimited title single user license. The fee for additional user licenses ids $350 per user. The cost includes all updates to your current version. There is a fee for upgrading to a new version. There are no required software maintenance or support contracts.

Implementation

Small publishers can easily implement this royalty software themselves. You can import or manually enter title, author information and sales information. If you have any questions you can contact Kensai International; the American distributor, or JDC Software; the software developers based in the UK, for guidance.

Companies with thousands of products and hundreds of royalty contracts that want an outside project manager to manage the implementation, conversion of existing data and staff training can engage Kensai International Ltd.

Kensai International Ltd.; based in New York, provides on-site implementation support and training in the United States for Easy Royalties. They have been in business since 1997 and have a customer list that spans three continents – North America, Europe and Africa. In 2010 they managed 13 royalty system implementations.

Support

Technical support is available from Kensai International and JDC Software.

Kensai International, Ltd. provides training and technical support via email, phone, online screen-sharing and on-site visits to Easy Royalty clients in North America. Kensai International Ltd. is based in New York.

JDC Software; the developers of Easy Royalties, provides free lifetime technical support via email to Easy Royalties users. JDC Software is based in the UK.

Easy Royalties Demo

A free 30 day trial version is available from www.easyroyaltiesus.com

Visit Easyroyaltiesusa.com for more information.

How to Purchase

1. Download the 30 day trial version.
2. Work with the trial version to determine if Easy Royalties meets your requirements. Create royalty contracts, import sales, and generate royalty statements.
3. Schedule an on-line 45 minute demo of the software with Kensai International to review the functionality of the software and confirm that it can handle your most complex royalty contracts.
4. Notify Kensai International that you wish to purchase the software and request an invoice. As soon as payment is received you will be sent an unlocking code for the software and asked to schedule an on-line training session. This free 45 minute on-line session covers software implementation, how to use the software and best practices for managing royalties.

Contact Information

Kensai International, Ltd
75 Nottingham Road, Malverne, NY 11565 USA

E-mail: info@kensai.net or Phone: (516) 593-0480