New Procedures Help Track Income of Songwriters, Clients

Always striving to improve service to ole writers and clients to make sure they are paid correctly, Senior Director Administration, Jennifer Beavis, and her team have streamlined critical back-office procedures to more efficiently monitor payments to their roster of talent.

"Anything that we do to increase the sophistication of our systems is a positive," says Beavis. "It's not only a benefit to us in terms of freeing up our time for ad-hoc queries and things that take personal intervention rather than computer analysis; it allows us to make sure we're collecting the income accurately and registering copyrights in a timely manner."

ole royalties income are tracked and analyzed constantly. "First and foremost, we have automated a way to input detailed royalty information into our accounting system," Beavis says. Previously, the process had required painstaking manual entry of data, but Beavis and Controller, Denis Dinsmore, found a way to automate that process via a gateway that marries the royalties system with accounting software. Secondly, once that royalty data is entered, a variance analysis is used as an important tool for pinpointing holes in revenues.

This increasingly automated variance reporting lets ole's royalty system feed data to standard variance reports then supplies those reports to account managers for their interpretation. "These go to management for discussion, and we then have an escalation process to resolve issues," says CEO Robert Ott.

"While we input data in our Music Maestro system, we are able to output a report monthly that transfers data to our software according to writer liability and income," Beavis explains. "That frees up the finance department's and the copyright administrator's time by allowing us to focus on resolving those issues to better serve our clients."

ole has also purchased modules for the system that allow highly customizable research of critical data to analyze actual and projected income.

"Because performance revenues, especially for film and TV – which is 60 percent of our business -- are often our client's only source of publishing income, it's important for us to analyze data on a constant basis," Beavis says.