ALCS: Prospering with SAP Business One & MS Teams
Authors’ Revenue Streams Maintained and Supported Through COVID-19 restrictions


The Client
About
ALCS
The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) is a notfor- profit membership organisation started by writers, for the benefit of writers. It collects and distributes money due to writers, novelists, script writers and journalists as well as nonfiction authors, for secondary uses of their works. With over 100k members, it distributed over £30m last year, and since 1977 has paid out around £500m to its members.
Its work also involves communicating with government and industry on rights and licensing as well as supporting and educating the public and industry.
Understandig the Problem
The Challenge
ALCS’s business is a complex operation, requiring the maintenance and processing of large volumes of data. Micro payments are collected globally for an array of work types and use cases, and these are distributed to members twice yearly. The payment process requires considerable processing power, so a scalable solution is essential to enable adequate performance during these peak times.
The capture, maintenance and tracking of all its members works and associated payments, required a bespoke development, integrated with a bank payment system.
The COVID-19 crisis has introduced ongoing challenges to traditional ways of working, requiring innovative responses from both partners to keep the business running, and to ensure systems are effectively supported.

The Solution
Making it Work
ALCS’s business is a complex operation, requiring the maintenance and processing of large volumes of data. Micro payments are collected globally for an array of work types and use cases, and these are distributed to members twice yearly. The payment process requires considerable processing power, so a scalable solution is essential to enable adequate performance during these peak times.
The capture, maintenance and tracking of all its members works and associated payments, required a bespoke development, integrated with a bank payment system.
The COVID-19 crisis has introduced ongoing challenges to traditional ways of working, requiring innovative responses from both partners to keep the business running, and to ensure systems are effectively supported.
Discover the Benefits
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Provides ALCS with fully auditable revenue collection, payments and finance processes
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Visibility for all ALCS members to view and edit their own data within the system
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Scalable infrastructure, delivering processing power as needed for ALCS peak payment periods
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Extensive use of BPA to monitor KPIs and provide workload metrics to individual managers within ALCS
We value the long-term relationship we have with Codestone and we benefit from Codestone’s ability to deliver and support our end-to-end business systems. We have all had to adapt to the COVID-19 restrictions, and Codestone has transitioned to new ways of working without major impact to the level of service they have always provided.Systems Manager at ALCS