Automate Your
Contracts, Rights & Royalties

Folio is designed to be content-agnostic, which in practical terms means it isn't restricted to any single type of intellectual property. Rather than being built around a narrow definition of what a "publishing contract" looks like, Folio is flexible enough to accommodate the full range of IP types and deal structures that modern content businesses encounter. If it can be owned, licensed, sold, or monetised under a contract, Folio is built to manage it.

Books and long-form content. The most traditional publishing use case — managing contracts for novels, non-fiction titles, reference works, and other book-length content — is naturally at the heart of what Folio does. This includes everything from straightforward single-author agreements through to complex multi-contributor works with different royalty arrangements for each participant.

Journals and academic content. For academic and professional publishers managing journal articles, research papers, and other scholarly content, Folio handles the specific contractual and rights structures that this type of publishing involves, including contributor agreements and licensing arrangements with institutions and aggregators.
Digital and online content. As publishing has moved increasingly into digital formats, the contracts governing digital content have become an important part of any publisher's rights portfolio. Folio accommodates digital rights alongside traditional print rights, and can manage the different royalty structures and licensing terms that digital distribution typically involves.

Audio and emerging formats. The growth of audiobooks and other emerging content formats has introduced new contractual complexity for many publishers — separate rights grants, different royalty rates, and distinct distribution arrangements. Folio is built to handle format-specific rights and royalty structures, meaning you can manage audio rights, ebook rights, and print rights for the same title within a single contract record or as separate agreements, depending on how your deals are structured.

Sub-rights and subsidiary rights. Beyond the primary publishing agreement, Folio manages the full ecosystem of subsidiary rights that a title can generate — translation rights, serialisation rights, adaptation rights, merchandising, and more. Each of these can be managed as a distinct rights agreement linked to the underlying work, with its own income tracking and royalty obligations.

Educational and instructional content. Publishers of educational materials, textbooks, and instructional content often deal with particularly complex rights arrangements — content that spans multiple formats, is licensed to institutions, and involves contributions from multiple authors or subject matter experts. Folio's flexible contract structure accommodates this complexity without requiring workarounds.

Licensed and third-party IP. Folio isn't only useful for managing IP you have created or acquired from authors — it also supports the management of IP you have licensed in from third parties. If your business involves acquiring rights to use or distribute content owned by others, Folio can track those inbound licensing arrangements alongside your outbound agreements, giving you a complete picture of your IP obligations in both directions.

Music, gaming, and beyond. While Ingenta has developed specialist variants of its royalty platform for specific industries — conChord for music and Gambit for gaming — the underlying principles of Folio apply equally to any sector where intellectual property is created, owned, licensed, and monetised under contract. The content-agnostic design means that organisations outside traditional publishing who deal in IP can also find Folio a practical fit for their needs.

Creating contracts in Folio is designed to be a straightforward and guided experience, built around a step-by-step wizard that walks you through the process from start to finish. Whether you're setting up a simple single-author agreement or a more complex contract with multiple owners, advances, and subsidiary rights, the wizard ensures nothing important is overlooked while giving you the flexibility to work at your own pace.

Yes, Folio includes built-in functionality to email royalty statements directly to your authors and rights holders. Rather than having to download statements and distribute them manually, Folio can handle the distribution process automatically, saving your team considerable time — particularly at busy statement periods when you may need to send a large volume of statements in one go. Royalty statements can also be pushed directly to Aperture - Ingenta's author portal platform. The choice of output can be controlled at an individual level, set via an individual's CRM record. 

Yes, Folio has robust multi-currency support built into its core functionality. For any publishing business operating across international markets — whether that means importing sales data in foreign currencies, paying authors in their local currency, or processing sub-rights income from overseas licensees — Folio is equipped to handle the currency conversions that come with that activity accurately and consistently.

Yes - Ingenta Folio can integrate with most common CRM platforms and a large number of master data systems. 

To import a file, you can either drag and drop from the file system, or click the button as indicated to select files for import. You can import more than one file at a time. Ingenta Folio also supports sales data import via API calls - please speak to a member of the team for more information.

Yes, Folio supports automated file retrieval and importing via FTP, and it's a straightforward process to configure. This is particularly useful if your distributor or sales data provider deposits sales files to an FTP location on a regular schedule — Folio can be set up to collect and import those files automatically, without anyone having to manually download and upload them each time.

Folio is designed to be used by publishing professionals, not technical specialists, and that philosophy shapes everything about how the platform is built and presented.

It's built around how publishers actually work. Rather than being a generic database or contract management tool that's been adapted for publishing, Folio has been developed specifically for the rights and royalties workflows that publishing businesses run every day. That means the language it uses, the way it structures information, and the tasks it's organised around will feel familiar and logical to anyone who has worked in a rights, royalties, or contracts role.

The interface is browser-based and straightforward. Because Folio runs in a standard web browser, there's no specialist software to install or learn. If your team can navigate a website, they can navigate Folio.

Configurable to your way of working. . Folio is designed to be configured to match your organisation's existing processes, terminology, and preferences. This means that by the time your team starts using it day to day, it should already feel like it's been built with your business in mind rather than something generic you're having to work around.

Training is provided as standard. No system, however well designed, is entirely self-explanatory from day one. Ingenta provides training as part of the implementation process, ensuring that the people who will be using Folio regularly are comfortable with its core functions before they go live.

Day-to-day tasks are largely automated. A significant part of what makes a system feel difficult to use is the volume and repetitiveness of the tasks it asks you to perform manually. Because Folio automates many of the most time-consuming processes — royalty calculations, statement generation, payment scheduling, deadline alerts — the day-to-day experience for most users is less about inputting data and more about reviewing, approving, and acting on information the system has already prepared. That's a considerably lighter and more manageable workload than a manual process demands.

Complexity is handled by the system, not the user. Publishing contracts can be genuinely complex — multiple authors, escalating royalty rates, territory splits, advance recoupment, sub-rights — and one of the legitimate concerns about any management system is whether that complexity gets transferred to the user interface. Folio is designed to absorb that complexity in the background, presenting users with clear outputs and actions rather than asking them to navigate the underlying intricacy themselves. You define the terms of your contracts once, and the system handles the calculations and obligations that flow from them.

Support is available when you need it. Ingenta provides ongoing support to its clients, meaning that if a user encounters something they're unsure about, help is available. For smaller organisations in particular, knowing that you're not on your own if you hit a roadblock makes a significant difference to how confident your team feels about using the platform day to day.

Folio is designed from the ground up to accommodate the full breadth and variety of contracts that a modern publishing operation is likely to encounter.
It's content-agnostic by design. Folio doesn't make assumptions about the type of intellectual property you're managing or the structure of the agreements that govern it. Whether you're dealing with books, journals, articles, digital content, educational materials, or emerging formats, the platform is flexible enough to capture and manage the specific terms that apply to each. This is particularly valuable for publishers whose catalogues span multiple content types or who are moving into new formats and need their contracts system to move with them.

Author and contributor agreements. The most common contract type in publishing — the agreement between a publisher and an author or contributor — is naturally at the heart of what Folio handles. This includes straightforward single-author agreements as well as more complex arrangements involving multiple authors, editors, illustrators, or other contributors, each potentially with different royalty rates, advance terms, and rights provisions.

Sub-rights and subsidiary rights agreements. Beyond the primary publishing agreement, most titles generate a web of subsidiary rights — translation rights, serialisation rights, audio rights, film and TV adaptation rights, merchandising, and more. Folio allows you to manage each of these as distinct agreements linked to the underlying title, giving you a complete picture of all the rights associated with any given work and the income streams they generate.

Licensing agreements. Where you are licensing your content to third parties — whether that's a foreign publisher taking translation rights, a digital platform licensing your journal content, or an educational institution purchasing a rights-managed excerpt — Folio can manage the terms of those licensing arrangements, track the income they generate, and ensure that any royalty obligations flowing from that income are correctly calculated and paid.

Co-publishing and co-edition agreements. Joint publishing arrangements, where rights and responsibilities are shared between two or more publishers, introduce a layer of complexity that spreadsheets handle particularly badly. Folio is built to accommodate these arrangements, capturing the specific terms of each party's involvement and ensuring that income and costs are allocated correctly between them.

Agency and representation agreements. For publishers who work with literary agents or rights representatives, Folio can manage the contractual relationship with the agency as well as the underlying author agreement, including the calculation and payment of agency commissions from royalty income.

Distribution and sales agreements. Contracts governing the distribution of your titles — whether physical or digital — can also be managed within Folio, giving you visibility over the commercial terms that govern how your content reaches the market and the revenue it generates when it does.

Contracts with complex and variable terms. Publishing agreements routinely involve escalating royalty rates that change at different sales thresholds, rights that vary by territory, language, or format, advance structures with multiple payment instalments, and reversion clauses triggered by specific commercial conditions. Folio is specifically engineered to capture and act on this kind of complexity, rather than forcing you to simplify your contract terms to fit the limitations of your system.

A complete contract history. As contracts are amended, renewed, or renegotiated over time, Folio maintains a full history of each agreement, so you can always see what the original terms were, what has changed and when, and what the current position is. This longitudinal view is invaluable when disputes arise or when you need to understand the commercial history of a particular title or relationship.

You don't need an in-house IT team to get up and running with Folio.

Folio is a web-based platform. There's no software to install on individual machines, no servers to procure or maintain, and no technical infrastructure to manage on your side. As long as your team has a modern web browser and an internet connection, they can access Folio. That immediately removes one of the biggest technical hurdles smaller organisations typically worry about.

Ingenta handles the heavy lifting. Ingenta has a dedicated implementation services team whose job it is to get you set up correctly. They will work with you to understand your contracts, your workflows, and your data — and then configure the system accordingly. You don't need to know how to build or configure the platform yourself; you just need to know your own business, which you already do.

Data migration is supported by Ingenta. If you're moving from spreadsheets or another system, the prospect of getting all your existing contract and royalty data into a new platform can feel daunting. Ingenta's implementation team has experience doing exactly this and will guide you through the process, helping to cleanse and structure your data so it transfers cleanly rather than leaving you to figure it out alone.

Training is part of the process. Getting your team comfortable with a new system doesn't require technical knowledge — it requires good training, which Ingenta provides as part of the implementation process. Folio is designed to be used by rights managers, royalties administrators, and finance staff, not software engineers. The interface is browser-based and built around the kinds of tasks publishing professionals perform every day, so the learning curve is much more about understanding the system's logic than navigating anything technically complex.

Ongoing support is available. Once you're live, you're not left to manage things alone. Ingenta offers ongoing applications management services, meaning that if something needs attention at a system level, their team handles it rather than yours. For a small organisation without IT resource, this is a significant practical benefit — you get the capabilities of an enterprise-grade platform without needing the internal expertise to maintain it.

Integration complexity scales with your needs. If your operation is relatively straightforward — you're not looking to connect Folio to a complex web of other systems on day one — then the technical complexity of your implementation will be correspondingly low. Many smaller publishers start with a more contained setup and expand their use of the platform over time as their confidence and requirements grow. You don't need to do everything at once.
In short, the absence of an IT department is not a barrier to implementing Folio. Ingenta is set up to support organisations exactly like yours, and the platform itself is designed to be operated by publishing professionals rather than technologists. What you do need is a clear picture of your contracts and workflows, and a willingness to engage with the implementation process — Ingenta will take care of the rest.

Spreadsheets are a perfectly reasonable starting point when you're managing a small number of contracts and your royalty calculations are relatively straightforward. But as your catalogue grows, your deals become more complex, and more people need access to the same information, spreadsheets start to create more problems than they solve. Here's why Folio represents a meaningful step forward:

Accuracy and reliability.
Spreadsheets are highly vulnerable to human error. A mistyped figure, a broken formula, or someone accidentally overwriting a cell can silently corrupt your royalty calculations — and you may not catch it until an author queries their statement. Folio performs calculations automatically based on the terms locked into each contract record, dramatically reducing the risk of errors creeping in through manual handling.

A single source of truth.
In most publishing businesses that rely on spreadsheets, the data tends to be fragmented — one file for contracts, another for royalty calculations, another for payments, perhaps maintained by different people in different departments. This creates version control nightmares and makes it almost impossible to get a reliable, up-to-date picture across your whole catalogue at any given moment. Folio consolidates everything into one system, so everyone is always working from the same data.

Handling complexity.
Spreadsheets struggle badly with the kind of complexity that publishing contracts routinely involve — escalating royalty rates, multi-author income splits, territory-specific rights, advance recoupment tracking, and variable payment schedules. What might be manageable in a spreadsheet for one contract becomes completely unwieldy across a hundred. Folio is specifically designed to handle this complexity cleanly and consistently, regardless of how intricate your deal structures are.

Automation.
One of the biggest drains on a rights and royalties team's time is the manual process of calculating statements, chasing data from multiple sources, and producing payment runs. Folio automates all of this. Once your contracts and sales data are in the system, royalty statements can be generated and scheduled automatically — freeing your team to focus on higher-value work rather than repetitive number-crunching.

Audit trail and accountability
A spreadsheet offers very little in the way of accountability. It's difficult to know who changed what and when, and nearly impossible to reconstruct a reliable history if something goes wrong. Folio maintains a full audit trail of every action taken in the system, which is invaluable for internal governance, dispute resolution, and regulatory compliance.

Scalability
A spreadsheet that works adequately for 50 contracts will become a serious liability at 500. Folio is built to scale with your business, handling growing volumes of contracts, rights, and transactions without any degradation in performance or reliability.

In short, a spreadsheet asks your team to do the work that Folio does automatically. For a small, simple operation it may be sufficient — but for any publisher serious about managing their intellectual property professionally, efficiently, and at scale, the limitations of spreadsheets quickly become a genuine business risk rather than just an inconvenience.

Yes - Ingenta Folio is designed with integration in mind, and Ingenta can discuss the specific integration options available depending on your technical environment. An API allows other systems — such as your ERP, finance software, or sales reporting tools — to exchange data with Ingenta Folio automatically, reducing the need for manual data entry and keeping information consistent across your organisation. The best approach is to outline your integration requirements to the Ingenta team early in the conversation so they can confirm compatibility.

Folio is used by some of the largest publishers in the world, but it's designed to be accessible regardless of size. If you're managing more than a handful of contracts and finding that spreadsheets are becoming unreliable or time-consuming, Folio is likely a worthwhile investment. The efficiency gains — particularly around royalty calculation and statement generation — tend to be felt quickly, even at modest scale. The best approach is to have a conversation with the Ingenta team about your specific catalogue size and workflows.

Yes - Ingenta offers a free trial of Ingenta Folio in a sandbox environment - subject to initial discovery and product demonstration.