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Business Process Flow — Royalty Licensing & Collection

As-is / to-be process mapping produced during the business process review. Companion to the BRD and traceability matrix.

Synthetic portfolio artifact for demonstration purposes.

AS-IS Legacy process (Microsoft Access)

flowchart TB
    subgraph Grower["Grower / Licensee"]
      A1[Submit sales volume
by email/spreadsheet]
    end
    subgraph Licensing["Licensing Officer"]
      B1[Manually enter volume
into Access form]
      B2[Look up royalty rate
from separate rate sheet]
    end
    subgraph Finance["Finance / Royalty Team"]
      C1[Re-run Access query
to calculate amount due]
      C2[Manually cross-check
against bank statement]
      C3{Discrepancy found?}
      C4[Manual investigation
— no audit trail]
      C5[Mark as paid in
separate spreadsheet]
    end
    A1 --> B1 --> B2 --> C1 --> C2 --> C3
    C3 -- yes --> C4 --> C2
    C3 -- no --> C5

Findings: royalty rate and payment status are held in two disconnected places (Access + spreadsheet); reconciliation is manual and produces no audit trail when a discrepancy is found.

TO-BE Target process (PostgreSQL platform)

flowchart TB
    subgraph Grower2["Grower / Licensee"]
      D1[Submit sales volume
via portal / API]
    end
    subgraph System["Platform (automated)"]
      E1[Volume recorded against
royalty_contracts]
      E2[Amount due calculated
automatically from contract rate]
      E3[royalty_transactions ledger
updated: outstanding]
    end
    subgraph Finance2["Finance / Royalty Team"]
      F1[Review outstanding
transactions dashboard]
      F2[Confirm payment received]
      F3[Transaction marked paid
— full audit trail retained]
    end
    D1 --> E1 --> E2 --> E3 --> F1 --> F2 --> F3

Improvement: a single royalty_transactions ledger removes the manual recalculation step and gives Finance a real-time outstanding/paid view with full traceability — directly addressing BR-03 and BR-04.

See the supporting data model → | View stakeholder presentation →