Switching Royalty Software Without Losing Your History
Learning a new tool is the easy part. The hard part is trusting that years of advance balances, held reserves, and tier positions come across intact.
Most publishers put off switching royalty systems for the same reason: the spreadsheet is ugly, but its numbers have been right, and nobody wants to be the one who sends an author a wrong statement. That caution is reasonable. It is also why a switch goes best when you plan it around one question: what does the new system need to know to produce the statement your old one would have produced?
This guide lists what to gather, how each piece gets into Familiar, and a three-step plan that lets you check the new numbers before any author sees them.
What to Gather First
- Your catalog: titles, ISBNs, and formats.
- Contracts, either the signed documents or the terms as you track them today.
- For each contributor and book: the advance, how much of it has been paid, and how much has been recouped through which month.
- Any reserves against returns you are holding now, and when they are due to release.
- Lifetime sales for books on escalating royalty tiers. Units by ISBN and format is enough.
- Past statements you want contributors to be able to look up.
What Moves Over, and How
The guides to advance recoupment, royalty escalators, and reserves against returns explain why each of those balances matters.
Coming From Metacomet or Perfect Bound
Familiar has direct imports for both, so you do not have to rebuild contracts by hand.
- Metacomet: upload the royalty terms report and the people export. You review the royalty terms, payments, and historical payments before anything is created.
- Perfect Bound: upload the structures and balances exports. Royalty terms come across for review, and unpaid balances become opening balances.
Neither export includes advances. To bring them across in the same upload, add Advance, Advance Paid Date, Advance Recouped, and Advance Recouped Through columns to the terms or structures sheet. Otherwise, enter each advance and its recouped-to-date amount after the import, before calculating any royalties.
How Switching Works
- 1
Set up your catalog and contracts
Import your catalog, then upload contracts or apply templates. Review the extracted terms for each contributor before anything is calculated.
- 2
Bring your history across
Choose a cutover period. Import sales from before it so tiers start in the right place, and enter advances recouped to date and reserves currently held.
- 3
Run one period side by side
Upload the first period's distributor statements and compare Familiar's numbers with your old system for the same period. Once they agree, send statements from Familiar.
The side-by-side period is the step people are tempted to skip, and the one that makes the switch safe. If the two systems disagree, you find out from a comparison rather than from an author.
Signs the Spreadsheet Has Run Its Course
- Statement season takes days, most of it spent reformatting distributor reports.
- Advance balances, reserves, and tier counts are carried forward by hand from last period's tab.
- One person understands the workbook, and statements wait when they are away.
- Authors email to ask where they stand, because the statement does not show it.
If that sounds familiar, see how Familiar handles royalties. Questions about your setup before you start? Contact us.