Deal Management

The increasingly complex and ever changing licensing industry is challenging intellectual property owners in unprecedented ways. Licensors are finding it more and more difficult to respond to evolving requests to handle the royalty rules behind these licensing deals.

The IPM Suite Deal Management (DM) module manages contracts, rights hierarchies, and facilities processing of royalty statements to calculate royalties and overages (accounting for guarantees, advance payments and other financial considerations). The IPM Suite DM module is directly integrated with existing Accounts Receivable to automate invoicing, collections and financial reporting. By eliminating manual work-a-rounds, the system increases productivity, insures accuracy and enables strategic decision making.

Licensee/Agent Management

Many companies tell us that their existing processes and systems lack sufficient support concerning management of data and the processes surrounding licensees or agents. Commissions paid to agents are manual, often resulting in errors such as duplicate payments. Disparate information manually aggregated from a variety of systems leads to wasted time, money and labor. Conversely, the IPM Suite DM module offers:

  • A central repository of licensees and agents, providing structured and consistent data with which to draft deals.
  • Zero inconsistencies and errors, increasing profits and reducing manual effort.

Deal and Property Entry

The IPM Suite DM module offers client-configured fields to capture and track specific information. This flexible design allows the system to capture broad contract elements and create hierarchies to address highly complex contract scenarios having multiple variables. The ease of entering contracts using templates and drop down menus from the IPM Suite DM module, along with built-in validation processes, minimize user errors and reduce mismanagement of data during the contract creation process. One consistent central repository for contract data provides an efficient means to archive, access, search and report on contracts. This leads to an increase in responsiveness and more accurate answers to questions about contracts and rights availability. It also reduces errors and provides robust history tracking, which leads to lower auditing costs.

One consistent central repository for contract data provides an efficient means to archive, access, search and report on contracts. This leads to an increase in responsiveness and more accurate answers to questions about contracts and rights availability. It also reduces errors and provides robust history tracking, which leads to lower auditing costs.

Licensing Out, Royalties In

The IPM Suite DM module supports multiple types of deals with ease, whether the contract is for merchandising rights, promotional partnerships, content licensing or other types of agreements. License and Royalty agreements vary from very simple to complex. Without a reliable system, complex contracts run the risk of failing compliance standards and incurring legal penalties.

The IPM Suite DM module simplifies this process by assigning Rights to properties across user-assigned rights attributes. Users can easily track and search the contract terms between licensor and licensee along variables including territories, channels, categories, advances, sell off and work flow driven deal status. Royalty rates are assigned to these rights and applied to sales data, calculating royalties due. Robust collision checking ensures that rights being licensed are available. Everything is searchable and offers a real-time view of licensing and revenues, along with who is being billed and what monies are collected.

  • Track and manage multiple types of complex licensing deals with client configurable fields
  • Check collisions to ensure compliance with deal terms
  • Record royalty and payment terms and their proper associations

Workflow

With no work flow in place, many systems force users to perform manual routing and contract review for approval. The IPM Suite DM module tracks key contract events with sophisticated and configurable workflow tools. The advantages of automation are varied and many. Manual approvals are time consuming and many deals may fall through due to delays. The IPM Suite DM module enables a time saving automated approval process and status tracking capability that reduces errors and provides an audit trail of required approvals. The web-enabled workflow engine automatically routes deals to their respective approver and enables access from anywhere at any time.

  • Streamline processes with approval workflows and notifications
  • Trigger reminders based on system events or pre-set dates
  • Eliminate manual approval and speed up the licensing process

Audit Trail

The contract lifecycle doesnŐt end after contract execution. In most cases, contract amendments are frequent and complex. While some systems are limited in their ability to manage the amendment process, the IPM Suite DM module stores a detailed history of amendment revisions and allows for comparisons between different versions. An audit trail provides a snap shot of which user was logged in, what data fields were modified and the date/time of each revision.

  • Track revision and amendment history, providing an audit trail as well as comparisons between different contract versions.
  • Auto archive and intelligent revisions based on who has edited the contract and what was changed.
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