A report for every brand owner, every month
Alongside your own brands, you cook two delivery-only brands under licence. The brand owners supply the menu, the recipes and sometimes the packaging. You cook, and they take a fee based on sales. Each one wants a monthly report: orders, gross sales, maybe sales net of discounts, broken down by app. One wants it on their portal, one wants a spreadsheet in their template.
At the start of every month, you download statements for each brand listing from each app, copy the numbers into each template, work out the fee, and send them off. Then one brand owner queries a figure because it does not match what they see in their own dashboard, and you spend another evening working out why.
Why licensor reporting is so painful
Licensed brands add a second audience for your numbers. Your accountant wants one thing, each brand owner wants another, and each agreement defines sales slightly differently: before or after promotions, with or without delivery fees, refunds deducted in the month of the order or the month of the refund.
The data comes from app statements in different formats and different periods. Building the report by hand means making the same judgement calls every month, and if the person who did it last month is not the person doing it now, the figures shift in small ways that brand owners notice.
Some brand owners also ask for more than sales: ratings, complaint counts, availability during agreed hours or how often items were switched off. Each extra measure is another place to look and another number to copy by hand.
What the manual process costs
| Problem | Effect |
|---|---|
| Different definitions per agreement | Mistakes when rules are applied by memory |
| Different templates per licensor | Hours of copying and reformatting |
| Statement periods that do not align | Figures that do not match the brand owner's view |
| No working kept | Queries take evenings to answer |
| Reports sent late | Strain on the relationship with the brand owner |
There is a risk in both directions. Under-reporting damages trust and can breach your agreement. Over-reporting means paying fees on sales you did not really have. Only a consistent method avoids both.
Reports built from the orders
- We collect orders and statements for each licensed brand's listings on each app, in one common format, through partner reporting or statement exports.
- With you, we write down how each agreement defines the figures it needs, such as which discounts, refunds and fees are included, and set those rules in the tool. We apply what you tell us and do not interpret the contracts.
- At each reporting date, the tool calculates the figures per brand and per app using those rules, and produces the report in each licensor's template or upload format.
- Every figure links back to the orders and statement lines behind it, so a query can be answered by showing the working.
- A reconciliation check compares the reported sales with the payouts received, so anything that does not tie up is flagged before the report goes out.
- Reports can be sent automatically or held for your approval.
If a brand owner offers a data feed or accepts a standard file, we build to that. If they need access to live figures, we can give them a view limited to their own brand.
Month end after the change
On the first of the month, both licensor reports are ready for you to check. One is a spreadsheet in the brand owner's template, the other a file ready to upload to their portal. When one of them asks why the figure differs from their dashboard, you open the report, see that a batch of refunds landed in the following week, and send them the order-level working within minutes.
- Licensor reports produced from the orders, not copied by hand
- Each agreement's definitions applied the same way every month
- Working behind every figure for queries
- Reports reconciled with payouts before sending
Do licensor reports eat your month end?
- You cook one or more delivery brands under licence.
- Each brand owner wants reports in a different format.
- You rebuild the reports from app statements every month.
- Brand owners have queried your figures.
- Only one person understands how the reports are worked out.