News archive

Pelican ProFiles is happy to announce the completion of our Budgeting Module for royalties and sales. Licensors require Licensees to submit annual Budgets predicting the royalties and often sales, units and other data for the next year. As royalties are received the budgets need to be updated and re-forecasted. In our experience in the industry this process becomes quite tedious and time consuming for both the licensors and the licensees. Each licensor requires data at different levels, some quite detailed and some quite broad. Then add into the mix, a variety of fiscal calendars between the licensor and their licensees, and it is not hard to understand why this process needs automating.

Gullane Entertainment (Thomas the Tank Engine) in Southampton, England, joined with us as a Partner in Development on this project. They already had a very detailed manual budgeting process in place that served as the model for this automated, flexible, parameter driven system. It draws upon the vast contract and royalty reporting data already available in the Pelican ProFiles Contract Management System.

Budget information can be entered manually or imported using Budget Worksheets. These Budget Worksheets are created with ease by the system for each Agent, Licensee, or by Contract and sent to the receiving party via email. The Agents or Licensees need only to open them in Excel, fill in the information and send back the worksheet. The data is then imported into the Budget Module. At this time any new SKU's that do not exist in the system can be created "on the fly" as they are received in this upload. This aspect of the system is very important to a client like Gullane who has over 500 contracts to budget and requires budgeting on each contract at the SKU level. Their licensees will love it also, as the spreadsheet arrives fully populated with the required SKU data. A process that once took weeks, has been reduced to days, even hours in some cases.

As royalties are entered and posted into the Pelican ProFiles Contract Management System, the budget is updated with actual data and then the fun begins. Online queries and reports allow licensing managers to quickly view the current and projected state of affairs for their respective contracts based on forecasted versus actual data. This module is also parameter driven, allowing great flexibility between various installs. Each client can budget the way they do business.