People often ask what tools we are using to build Oceanhouse Media. One area of particular interest has to do with royalty accounting. When you deal with lots of contractors (as we do) you need a dedicated system in place to manage royalty payments. Simple royalty calculations can be done in Excel, but the problem gets exponentially more complicated every month. Apple delivers 7 statements a month (one per territory). Some statements are calculated in currencies other than US dollars. As you start to multiply the number of statements times the number of apps times the number of contributors you quickly get an Excel nightmare. A few months ago I did research into this topic. I thought it would be good to share my findings with other app developers.
The closest model that I could think of for app royalty accounting was the book industry model. Book publishers deal with hundreds of products written by a large number of authors. It seemed logical that a good book accounting package would work for apps as well. As I researched a half-dozen websites, I was encouraged that I’d have many products to choose from. However, as I started to test drive them (usually under a 30-day license) I found that many fell short of basic needs for app developers. Thankfully, there was one product that worked well. To my surprise, it was also one of the more reasonably priced packages.
Dashbook (by Financial Softworks) is a fairly new package that runs $249. It was originally designed for book and music publishers. Dashbook has the ability to track hundreds of products and plenty of authors (artists, programmers, etc). Royalties can be calculated as a flat rate percentage or on a sliding scale. Advances are handled properly as well (assuming that you may need to pay and track them). Dashbook imports Apple iTunes royalty statements without modification (this alone is a fantastic feature). At the end of each month, I simply pull down to “Pay all Authors” and the system lets me know exactly how much money is due to each individual. Put simply, Dashbook addresses all of my royalty accounting needs.
My issues with Dashbook are minor, but they are worth noting. First, the software runs only on Windows, so you’ll need to install Windows on your Mac. I use VMware Fusion 2 and Windows XP. Second, all of the terms/presets are designed with the book industry in mind. You’ll want to use SKUs instead of ISBN numbers. You’ll need to use the “Sales Commission” field to track “Wire Transfer Fees” if you want the fees proportionally subtracted from the statements. Engineers are listed as “Authors.” None of these are major problems. You can still pull all of the calculations that you need, it’s just that you need to twist your head around a few things and ignore many of the other features (inventory tracking of physical products, etc). Hopefully, with time, some of these things can be changed by the user, or perhaps a master setting will allow the user to be in “App Publisher Mode” instead of “Book Publisher Mode.”
To their credit, the developers have been very responsive to my requests for changes. They see the value of serving the app development industry and they appear willing to do what it takes to make Dashbook robust enough for app publishers. All in all, I do recommend Dashbook for anyone needing to track royalty payments based on iPhone app sales. If anyone else can recommend additional tools that would be worth looking into, please let me know.
