What is the service?
As part of this service, Canyon will:
- Immediately engage your team in a proactive internal licensing review.
- Identify potential compliance issues and discuss possible financial exposures related to these issues.
- Work with your team to develop optimal responses to auditors’ requests for information.
- Develop counter arguments to audit findings, as appropriate, including identification of errors that may be discovered in publisher/auditor data.
- Provide an effective defense of your company’s positions regarding issues.
- Help you negotiate the best settlement possible.
Why is it important?
An audit can be a costly event in time, resources and financial impact. Audit findings can range from tens of thousands to tens of millions of dollars, and are often unexpectedly and shockingly high to customers.
Software publishers hire expert audit teams from Deloitte or KPMG or sometimes use their own in-house staff to do audits on a daily basis. In addition, publishers’ software contracts are complex and written to the advantage of the publisher.
It makes good business sense to level the playing field and create advantages for your team by engaging a knowledgeable, experienced, and effective consulting team that, on a daily basis, prepares and defends companies against these expert audit teams and is familiar with their strategies and tactics.
In our experience, the client receives an extremely high ROI from contracting for expert services and is grateful to have a knowledgeable, trusted advisor working solely on their side.
We have also seen that a significantly higher ROI can often be achieved by working with auditors on a product-by-product basis, instead of negotiating a percentage of the original settlement demand. Negotiating a percentage discount on the original findings is what companies often do when they don’t have expert support, especially when publishers increase the pressure by attaching time constraints to concluding a settlement.
Next steps
- Regardless of where you are in the audit process, from having received an official compliance letter to negotiating your settlement, consider reaching out for expert advice and support.
- The earlier in the process you develop an effective response and defense, the more options will be available. However, it is possible to make significant improvements to your negotiating position and settlement options at any point in the process.
- Having the right team to support you in an audit can make a tremendous difference to the outcome. Canyon has the knowledge, the experience, the track record, and the feedback from clients to demonstrate that our approach is consistently effective and produces exceptional results.