Kartel, our parent company, was reselling accounting software at the turn of the century. They were specialising in writing bespoke additions/functions that integrated with the accounting software for their customers. Kartel was recommended to Warp records who were looking for a royalty product which catered for profit sharing deals. Warp had looked on the market for quite some time and nothing came close to fulfilling their requirements.

Kartel were commissioned to write the application on the basis that they would then take it to market and offer it out to other record labels who were falling short from their IT systems perspective. Kartel are forever grateful to Warp for their foresight and trust.

Whilst the system has been developed with a profit sharing background it does deal with all other agreements that a record label may put into place - even so far as to be able to do one basis in one region and another basis in another region.

Due to the unique way in which we have put the emphasis at a track level rather than release level as our competitors seemed to have done, we was in a great position to cater for the digital revolution when it came about and believe that we have put in steps to future our customers for anything that is on the horizon.

With the level of information being held in the system, we also made it optional for our clients to use Korrect as a central store for their data - sleeve scans and track soundfiles are manageable so websites can link into the database, 3rd party applications etc - all ensuring a once only entry from an organisation's viewpoint.

Some of our early customers also purchased the accounting solution so when they setup a release in Korrect, it automatically creates the stock record in the accounting software. If they created a contract in Korrect, it would create a project and cost centre within the accounts system so all transactions could then be coded accordingly.

We have extended this so that a customer can choose which accounting software they want to run and we will still offer the integration service as an option - time and costs obviously dependent on the application.

A few years ago we looked at what a customer would have to have within their organisation in order to run Korrect, and it seemed that only the larger sized independents would have their own IT department capable of running a Microsoft SQL Server/database. This led us down the route of developing an online solution in order that all of the IT could be managed by us and the customer could use the software without having to invest in their IT infrastructure.

We also offer out a partial or completely managed service whereby we take the hassle of operating the software (whilst easy to use) away from the customer too - all a client would need to do is to provide the information in a set format and we would process it for them returning the statements in pdf formats for verification - everything else would be taken care of.

Korrect has been slow sold in the past due to the company wanting to get the product absolutely right before going to full market - we have adopted our customer feedback and incorporated it into the application. Of late we have just integrated a publishing module which we believe makes us even more unique in the fact that the same system is ran for recording and publishing royalties.

This has then prompted us to start working with collection societies - PPL in the UK being the first to be approached about how we can make the information more streamlined between our customers and the PPL's needs.

The Future:

Our plans are now to take our software overseas - concentrate on establishing well reputable distributors for our software whilst Kartel looks after the UK market.