The hidden cost of running foreign rights on spreadsheets

Almost every rights operation begins with one spreadsheet. It is free, everyone already knows how to use it, and for a while it genuinely works. Then it grows. A tab for each author, a tab for each fair, a colour code that made sense to exactly one person in 2021. Before long it has quietly become the memory of the whole business, and that is where the costs start piling up, in places no invoice ever shows.

Take deadlines. Options and licence terms expire on dates sitting in cells nobody is looking at. A lapsed option is not an admin slip, it is a right you no longer hold or money you will never bill. Your spreadsheet, for all its charm, will never once tap you on the shoulder to warn you.

Then there is the question you really ought to be able to answer on the spot. “Are we free to sell this in Germany?” should take five seconds. Across a dozen tabs and a buried email thread it takes twenty minutes, and the answer is only as current as the last time someone remembered to update the row.

And there is the fragility. No record of who changed what, no safety net when a formula gets dragged over the wrong cell, and far too much of the agency living in one person’s head and one person’s file. When they are on holiday, so, it turns out, is the memory.

This is not a fringe worry, or a new one. Raymond Panko at the University of Hawaii has spent decades studying spreadsheet quality and puts the average cell-error rate north of 5%, with the mistakes, in his words, “both common and non-trivial.” A 2024 research review reached the same blunt verdict: 94% of business spreadsheets contained errors. Its lead author, Professor Pak-Lok Poon, notes that “many end-users lack proper software development training, leading to more errors.” And a rights record that is confidently wrong is worse than no record at all, because you will actually act on it.

None of this means anyone is being careless. It is simply what a spreadsheet is: a place to keep data, not a thing that works the data for you. The real bill is not the hours spent typing. It is the deals that slipped and the rights that quietly lapsed because nothing was watching them.

The fix was never “try harder.” It is a tool that does the watching for you: a living rights database that knows what is sold, open or under option on every title, answers the Germany question on the spot, and nudges you about every option and renewal well before it bites. The spreadsheet was never the thing to fix. The deadline nobody saw was.