how to automate royalty payments?

[onlineghost]

I'm helping some artists sell their digital goods online.

The only question is that they're currently being sold in four different stores, a, b, c, and d. Each stores posts sales at different times (a every week, b every two weeks, c every four weeks, etc.)

However, I do have an automated way to get all the sales reports for each calendar month in an Excel spreadsheet.

All artists have currently agreed to give me 7% of sales.

What's an automated way to deal with these payments to give these to the musicians?

Dream scenario - items are sold - royalties received --- <automated thing> gives money out to artists --- leaves me my percentage.

ps - money can be doled out via paypal.

[kamakiri]

The easiest way is to pay someone to do it.

[froldt]

This is just a thought...
Can't you get an account that receives the payment (checking or savings or whatever at a bank). Then have controls/instructions set in place so that 7% of the amount is sent to your personal account and the remaining 93% is sent to your client's account? If there is a fee for this service (it could be a second account at your current bank) then it could be automatically billed from your primary account.

Hmm... this would only work if you had only one artist or they all used the same account.

Could you just hire an accountant to do this for you? The same procedure as above, but they send the money to it's proper place? Then, you'd already have your tax preparer in place, and it would be someone that you trusted.

[camdengirl]

I'm slightly tempted to agree.... However, looking at it a different way, it's really a bit like an affliliate scheme.

i.e. your product gets sold by an affiliate who sells for say £10 gross and your client (the artist) a %.

I'm still trawling thru effective affiliate schemes - ones where you retain the control! - so far 1ShoppingCart ($99/month) and Joomla (free but you'll need a techie geek) seem to have the most user friendly ones.

This way all the payments/reporting would be entirely automated.

Hope that helps!