Fox was programmed with a very fast setup procedure in mind. If your metadata is available as CSV, Text/Tab or Excel file, you can build a fully working royalty system with just a couple of clicks. During development, we always had the thousands of modern companies in mind, that keep their royalty structure simple - on purpose.

Fox does not penalize these clever, digital native companies, but utilizes this fact by presenting simple steps to get your royalty accounts in order. Most of the time, your metadata already has all information that is necessary to specify the right royalty account for each item: Label, Artist, Title, RefNo - or a combination of them.

If you already adapted to modern business practices in a digital world, Fox is your best companion.

This is the home screen of Fox where you can access all modules. An animated chart graph can be switched on or off by the user. Several charts are available and the reporting period can be set by the user:

   Sales Per Month
   Top Ten Countries
   Top Ten Channels
   Top Ten Accounts
   Top Ten Stores

When necessary, the chart can be opened in a separate, bigger window for a better viewing experience.

Import metadata directly into Fox. All you need is a CSV, text/tab or Excel file with typical, industry-standard information like Barcode, Product Artist, Product Title, ISRC, Track Artist and Track Title.

The internals of Fox are generally referencing items as being either a bundle or an asset. So companies outside the music business can easily use the same structure. Instead of building "albums" with "tracks, you can as well administer "font sets" with "fonts" or a "photo gallery", consisting of multiple "stock photographs".



Importing meta data is easy. Just click on the "Import Metadata" button and assign the column headers of your file to the internal field names of Fox by dragging and connecting fields to columns. If your metadata file references one asset per line and also mentions the bundle's reference number per line, Fox will automatically create bundles with their associated assets connected. As a record label, you get an "Album" with a "Playlist".

The last import order will be remembered for your next metadata import. So it becomes a no-brainer to constantly import your new catalog information in the future.

When importing a catalog from metadata, the user can connect each item to an existing account or create new accounts on-the-fly. Various options are available for the automatic creation of new accounts to match your needs.

The structure of accounts depends on the purpose of a company. An aggregator may use the "Bundle Group" field to identify a royalty account for each label it is distributing, where a record label would use the "Artist" field to pay for each release and track of certain artist. The user can also prepare its metadata sheet and set account names individually, as needed and they will be created and matched during import.

Account Groups are used to accumulate multiple accounts into one royalty statement for a recipient. While the accounts hold the royalty shares for a specific bundle or assets, the account group manages the general settings of a licensor, like: current royalty period and royalty intervals, statement layout and language, statement files to create (PDF, Excel, CSV) and payment information.

When generating royalty statements, Fox can create and export a list with payment information for each royalty statement. A special export is available for use with PayPal mass payments, if you wish so.

Accounts hold the actual shares that need to be payed when an item was sold. Fox generally offers two different shares for use with bundle or asset sales. The structure of account shares depends on the contracts with your partners or your business fields. This structure can be set up in the preferences.


Generally, you can define different sales types and country groups that trigger different royalty shares. For each combination of sales type and country group, one line will be available to hold the corresponding royalty shares. The most simple setup would be one sales type "All Sales" and one country group "World". This would result in a single line for the accounts to hold a percentage for bundle and asset sales.

In our example screen shot, Fox is separating "Download", "Stream" and "Physical" sales. While the shares are all the same, the different sales types would still be shown separately on a royalty statement. So the structure of accounts can also be used to show more specific information on a royalty statement, even when the shares are all the same.

Fox also offers the possibility to deduct a percentage from royalties. This deduction is optional and the user can define the name and share, individually. Examples are: "Distribution Fee", "Media Fee", "Hosting Fee", etc.

Royalty statements are created and administered in the statements module. The list view shows all important details about the statements: totals, payment and delivery status. You can create statements at any time (e.g. to plan your cash flow) for some or all account groups.

During statement creation, Fox is also generating all accompanying files as defined in the account groups: PDFs, Excel and CSV files are available. The files are instantly available and can be opened with a single click.

An optional automation feature even allows you to send your statements via email from Fox, directly. The body text is created on-the-fly and includes the list of files that are attached as one single zip file. The delivery process can be fine-tuned by allowing pauses between chunks of emails. This circumvents problems with many hosting companies that try to prevent spam by reducing the amount of emails being sent in a period of time.

Channels are the source of sales reports. These can be distributors, aggregators or even your own web shop. A channel can be assigned to a specific sales import slot and offers several other settings to ease the way for recurring imports of sales from the same source.

When importing sales from an aggregator, Fox allows you to also import the actual store (DSP) name. This name will be shown on the royalty statements and you can also use the store name for reporting and charting.

E.g. You import a sales report from TheOrchard (Channel). Each line of the report shows the store that sold the content: Apple Music, Amazon, Spotify, etc.

Sales are the basis for your royalty statements. Fox is highly optimized to import sales from different channels. A sales report in Fox states the reporting channel, the sales period, the currency and a payment status.

Fox can handle any incoming currency. When setting the payment status to "paid", Fox will convert all sales lines into your home currency.

The user can either let Fox use the latest exchange rate for the reported currency, or enter the real amount of money that was actually received from the reporting channel.

This comes handy when dealing with external currencies that do not only have a varying exchange rate, but where the payment also induces additional bank and transaction fees. Just enter the real amount received and Fox will do the rest.

Multiple setting tabs allow you to make Fox tick the way you want to.

Royalties: Setup your royalty rules and enter the standard shares to be used when creating new accounts. When adding or removing a royalty rule in the settings, all accounts will be adapted in real time. So you can just add a new rule for "Physical Sales" with a "20%" share in a second and all accounts are instantly prepared to receive a new type of revenue.

Account Groups: Insert the standard values to be used for newly created account groups here: currency, language, taxation, payout limits and other royalty statement options.

Language: Fox can handle two languages for you at the same time. While the software's interface is always presented in English, the outgoing royalty statements can be either presented in English or your home language. Just replace the words in the settings to match your needs. The language used on the statements can be set individually inside an account group.

General: Fox allows you to personalize your documents by using your own logo and footer text.

Currencies: All currencies of the world are ready to use inside Fox. But to reduce clutter, the user can select the currencies he is actually dealing with. The current exchange rates for all currencies can be imported from the web with a mouse click or even automatically, on startup.

While charts look pretty and give a fast overview of your business situation, reports offer a deeper insight into your sales data. Fox allows you to filter sales by country, channel, store, account and period and gives you detailed information that can be viewed, printed or exported with one mouse click.

By selecting your point of view, the aggregated reports can give you just the data you need for decision making. First you enter the search filters to focus on a specific data set. Then you select your aggregation point. For example: Select all sales for a year for one account as the search filter, then choose "country" as the aggregation point: You will see in which countries this specific account performed well in the given period.

FOX is based on the latest FileMaker technology and runs on:
  macOS 10.12-10.14
  Windows 7-10 (pro editions).

Our apps were built with speed in mind. Nevertheless, the software has to deal with lots of data and big files. As every database-centric software, it loves a fast disc system. So here are our recommendations. They are equal for Macintosh and Windows computers:

  a recent computer, not older than 4 years
  a Core i3 or better processor
  a minimum of 8GB of RAM
  an SSD (highly recommended)

We do not recommend using Windows 10 Home in a professional business environment, based on the history of problems with automatic updates from Microsoft. Windows 10 Pro allows the user to postpone updates to a later, safer date, when all obvious bugs are already ironed out.
 

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