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Docs > How-to > Royalties

Royalties are complicated. They pull together all the work done in the other parts of the system: contacts, products, contracts, sales, rights. This is a troubleshooting guide to help if things aren’t correct. Before you pore through this list, make sure all your automated royalty checks are passing or suppressed.

Royalty run troubleshooting

Royalty statement troubleshooting

General troubleshooting

Explanations

Sales have loaded and have royalties due but they are not appearing in the royalty run

  • Are the sales tagged with the same sales channel as the royalty specifier on the contract?
  • Does the contract have Statement sales lag and / or Minimum sales months required which would mean the sales shouldn’t be reported on that statement? Set them to zero if so.
  • Is the royalty specifier for the sale’s product and channel set to 0% or set as No base rate?
  • Is the sale’s invoice date before the the maximum sales invoice date?

Sales have loaded but they have incorrect royalties due in the royalty run

  • Does the royalty specifier have the correct percent royalty?
  • Does the royalty specifier have an escalator set correctly?
  • If it is a list price royalty rate, does the sale have a list price set?

Royalties due amounts are not as expected on royalty statements

  • Is the payee marked as a payee on the contract?
  • Does the payee have a split of the percentage in the Royalty Percentage splits table?

Products are not appearing in a royalty run, or products are missing from the add products menu of a royalty run

  • Check the product is not in another unapproved royalty run. A product can only appear in one royalty run at a time, to avoid double accounting.
  • If you chose to Add products with unroyaltied sales to the royalty run, make sure there are unroyaltied sales. Go to Financial > Sales transactions ⤴ and search for the title of the missing product, to see the sales for that product.

A contact or payee is not appearing in a royalty statement batch

  • Check the contact is not in another unapproved royalty statement batch. A contact can only appear in one royalty run at a time, to avoid double accounting.

A contract or work is not in a royalty statement batch, even though it is in the royalty run

  • Are sales for the contract within the recent royalty period?
  • Is the field labelled Statement sales lag months empty on the contract?

You might have asked us when setting up your royalties account to have a company-level statement sales lag months default. If this is set to, e.g. 4 months, and sales are only incurred in the 6-month period under report, then the contract won’t appear in the statement.

Solution: add 0 to the contract Statement sales lag months field, to override your company default. Save the contract, and re-generate the statements.

Can’t delete a payee from a contract if there are existing royalty statements

This is more of a feature than a bug, because you shouldn’t want to remove a payee if statements already exist, but: imagine you have two editors on a work, but the royalty is to be paid to their institution. Originally you could have both editors as payees, but if one is an editor for another work that has royalties, the system won’t let you remove it, the result being the royalty for the work shows on both the institution and the editor’s royalty statement.

  • To have the royalty data appear on the editor’s royalty statement, showing the deduction of the institution’s royalty in the summary, add the institution as an alternative payee to the editor.

  • To have a statement which only has the one contract on, go to https://web.consonance.app/contractsets/new, type in the name of a new contract set (call it something like Single statement for [work title]), and click Save. Go to the contract edit page, select the contract set from the dropdown labelled as such in the royalty statements region, and click Save. When you run the royalty statement, you’ll see that there are now two tabs, with your contract’s statement on the separate tab. You can choose not to send the statement to any of the payees on the contract.

The date of the sales up to on the royalty statement is wrong

This is affected by the statement sales lag month, on the contract’s edit page. If the date looks wrong, amend what you’ve put in the contract edit page and regenerate the statements.

Bonus clauses

A bonus clause, for example, whereby the author receives an extra bonus (on top of royalty escalators) when sales exceed an agreed volume, e.g. an extra £10,000 when print sales exceed 50k copies in the first year.

This is a one-off payment that must be handled outside of Consonance. Consonance currently has no mechanism to support one-off bonus clauses. You could possibly work around it by creating a paid advance, but it would appear on the royalty statement as an advance.

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