One desk for the whole agency.
Most agencies run on a spreadsheet, a to-do app, a rights tool, and an accountant's inbox, re-keying the same deal into each. Quillaris replaces that stack: clients, deals, royalties, money, rights, and reports in one system, so a record entered once flows everywhere it's needed.
Enter it once, it flows everywhere.
A submission converts to a deal carrying its data forward. The deal's advance schedule drives the payment. The payment computes commission and posts to the ledger. No copy-paste between systems, no reconciliation drift.
- Submission → Deal. Convert in place; the client, title, and editor carry over. Multi-book deals get their own name instead of borrowing Book 1's title.
- Deal → Money. Advance installments, fees, bonuses, options, permissions, deposits, and pass-through payments stay linked to the contract.
- Money → Commission. Agent and agency splits compute automatically and land on the ledger to the penny. Bonuses and fees a publisher pays alongside an advance are itemized inside the payment and commissioned with it.
Every kind of contract money.
A contract is rarely just an advance. Fees, bonuses, option payments, permissions, and commissions a publisher pays your client directly all sit on the same deal, each with its own type and category, and each labeled correctly on Expected Payments, the Record Payment picker, and the client's statement of earnings.
- Flat-fee work. Illustration, cover art, photography, and work for hire can be marked as flat compensation. No advance to earn out, and none of the royalties-due logic that goes with one.
- Partially recoupable advances. Where only part of an advance recoups against royalties, set that figure separately from the contract total. Earn-out tracking follows the recoupable amount.
- Refresher advances. A later top-up is recorded alongside the original advance and recoups the same way. Each one carries its date, so royalties reported before a refresher never recoup against it.
- Commission-only deals. When the publisher pays your client directly, mark the deal and every payment recorded against it starts as commission-only. The deals list filters on it.
- Foreign currency, locked at deposit. Money that has actually moved keeps the rate it was deposited at. Estimates convert at the current rate, and where no rate is available the figure is flagged rather than shown at one to one.
The right view for everyone involved.
One platform doesn't mean one door. Clients get a read-mostly portal; an out-of-house translation team gets just the tip sheets and publicity kits they need, without ever touching your roster or finances.
- Client portal. Authors log in to see their titles, deals, earnings, and shared documents, download their tax forms, and keep their own contact and payment details current. See the client portal.
- Scoped external access. Share exactly the documents a collaborator needs, and nothing more.
Reports and integrations on the same data.
Because everything lives in one model, more than forty live reports answer real questions instantly, and the numbers sync to QuickBooks Online, so the books reconcile themselves.
- 40+ live reports. Accountants' report, tax summary, deal pipeline, rights inventory, reversion candidates, each with Excel and PDF export.
- QuickBooks Online sync. Payments and commission map to your chart of accounts, with automatic token refresh, and a client's royalty letter attaches to its QuickBooks check automatically.
- Legacy data import. Bring clients, contracts, royalties, and history across from your current system. Import paths are scoped with you, case by case.
Know what's still yours to sell.
Pick a title, a subright, and a language, and the Subrights Wizard answers the question every rights meeting starts with: where is this still available? It reads every grant on the title, across every deal, and maps availability by right, territory, and language.
- Every blocking grant cited. A region isn't just "sold": you see which grant blocks it, to whom, exclusive or not, and when it expires.
- Rights hierarchy built in. World print sold means hardcover is off the table; film sold never blocks TV.
- Carve-outs respected. "World excluding Germany" re-opens Germany; "all languages except Spanish" leaves Spanish sellable.
- Advisories, not just answers. Non-exclusive sales, deals still in negotiation, and rights reverting soon are flagged alongside the result.
Commission, from the ledger to the agent.
Commission computes on every payment, and then it has to be reported, paid, and moved. The Commission page handles all three: what each agent has earned or been paid over a period, every processing run with its paperwork, and the money owed from the client escrow account to operating.
- By period. Commission by week or by month, on an earned or paid-to-agent basis, with subtotals. Agents see their own figures and nobody else's.
- Runs. Every processing run is kept with the payments it covered, a downloadable agency packet, per-agent bundles, and a single action to email the agents involved and mark them paid.
- Transfers. The agency commission still sitting in client escrow, net of any co-agent share, in USD at the rates frozen when the money landed. Record each transfer to operating with its PDF and keep the history.
- Voids and reprocessing settle themselves. Unposting a payment or running it again adjusts the outstanding transfer figure, so the number stays right without anyone recalculating it.
Pay by ACH, straight from the ledger.
When it's time to disburse, Quillaris builds a NACHA file your bank accepts from the payments you've already processed, so you never re-key an account number into a banking portal.
- Download-once lock. The moment a payment goes into a file it locks to that file, so nothing can pay out twice. Unlocks and regenerations are admin-only and logged with a reason.
- Eligibility enforced. Only USD, positive-net payments with valid routing and account details on file are included, and the routing number's checksum is validated up front.
- One entry per payee. A payment split across payees fans out into one entry each, every line carrying its own trace number, matching the payment instrument exactly.
- Built for your bank. Credit-only or balanced files, and for banks that fund from the discretionary-data field instead of an offset entry, that too. Settings use the standard NACHA field names, so you transcribe your bank's ACH worksheet line for line.
The work of a literary agency is specific. So is Quillaris.
The pages above are how the platform fits together. For the full list of what it handles natively, from auctions and subrights to 1042-S forms and NACHA files, see the features list.
Run the work, not just record it.
Tasks, projects, a shared agency calendar, and a customizable dashboard that surfaces every deadline that matters.
See project management Client portalA portal your clients actually use.
Titles, deals, royalties, payments, and tax forms, plus payees they maintain themselves with write-only banking and dual notification.
See the client portal Security & trustBuilt so you can prove it.
Role-based access scoped at the server, a field-level audit trail, encrypted tax data, and GDPR responses in two clicks.
See security