About
Let's talk

Royalty Collection: From Spreadsheets to Native

Scope

UX/UI · Product strategy · Negotiation

Role

End-to-end: Synthesis, UX, UI

Year

2024

For franchisors, collecting royalties was a manual nightmare involving fragmented spreadsheets and third-party invoicing outside of Square.

As a platform positioning itself as the "OS for Franchising," this was a critical gap. The challenge was to build a native calculation and collection engine that could handle diverse business models without overcomplicating the UI.

Royalty calculation interface

Insights & Strategy

Through customer interviews, we identified two structural requirements:

  • Formula Flexibility: There is no "universal" royalty fee. We needed a core model (percentage of gross sales) with enough modularity to support flat fees and tiered structures later.
  • Automation vs. Control: Operators were split. The system had to support both fully automated scheduling and a "review-before-send" manual workflow.

No universal royalty formula, but one model covers most cases

Royalty fee formula
Royalty screen 1 Royalty screen 2 Royalty screen 3

By this point we had already shipped a simplified version of the royalty fee formula. There were 5 formula variants in total — for P0 we went with the most straightforward one.

The Architectural Decision

The real design problem was platform placement. I explored three strategic directions to determine where the feature should live within the Square ecosystem:

  • Option A (Native): Built entirely within Franchise Suite. Pro: Full UX control. Con: High engineering cost (building payments from scratch).
  • Option B (Square-Native): Leveraging Square's existing invoice tools. Pro: Low lift. Con: Disjointed UX for franchise operators.
  • Option C (Pragmatic Hybrid): [Selected] Configuration lives in Franchise Suite; execution is powered by Square's invoicing rails.

Result: We chose Option C to balance speed-to-market with a coherent user experience, focusing the MVP on the most common royalty models.

The design challenge wasn't the UI. It was defining which product owned which part of the journey

Royalty formula versions

The Solution

I designed a unified configuration interface where franchisors set their rules once. The system automatically calculates dues based on real-time sales data and triggers Square's invoicing engine.

  • Shipped: Percentage-based royalties, automated/manual toggle, and a clear audit trail.
  • Iteration: Post-launch data prioritized "automated deductions" as the next high-value update.

Impact

➀ Adoption: ❚❚% of target users onboarded within the first weeks — a high rate for enterprise workflow changes.
➁ Sales Enablement: Successfully unblocked several "deal-breaker" enterprise accounts that required native royalty management to sign.
➂ Efficiency: Replaced hours of manual spreadsheet work with a "set-and-forget" native infrastructure.

Royalty Full