Yes. PocketSuite’s Royalty Fees feature bills and collects franchise royalties automatically: it generates and sends bills to location managers every month, lets them turn on auto-pay, and gives the franchisor a royalty dashboard showing at a glance how much is owed from each location at any given time.
PocketSuite powers 7,000+ service businesses, including 1,000+ pet service businesses, whose clients have collectively processed nearly $1 billion in income and scheduled over 9.2 million appointments. Royalty collection is one of the areas where that scale creates real operational weight, chasing monthly payments by hand across a growing number of locations is exactly the kind of task that either gets automated or quietly eats a franchisor’s time every single month.
Automating that billing cycle is not just a convenience for the franchisor’s own time, it is part of what keeps a franchise system’s royalty collection scaling smoothly as more locations come online, since the same automated bill, auto-pay option, and dashboard visibility apply identically whether a system has three locations or thirty.
Automatic Monthly Billing, Not a Manual Invoice Run
The core of the feature is automation on the billing side itself: PocketSuite generates and sends the royalty bill to each location manager every month without the franchisor manually creating and sending an invoice per location. Location managers can turn on auto-pay so the payment happens without anyone remembering to submit it, which is also what protects a franchisor from a payment simply being forgotten in a busy month.
That automatic cadence matters more the more locations a franchisor is billing. Manually invoicing three locations every month is tedious. Manually invoicing fifteen is a part-time job, and one that is easy to fall behind on exactly when the business is busy enough that royalty collection matters most.
“It’s convenient to text customers, refund them, send them pictures, and create invoices — it’s easier. Sometimes I can set a time and it will send out the invoice to the customer while I’m asleep.” said Tayata Thomas, owner, The Lovable Dogs Club, describing the same kind of automated billing at the individual-client level. A franchisor collecting royalties from a growing number of locations benefits from that exact mechanic at the system level: set it once, and the bill goes out on schedule without anyone having to remember to send it.
The Royalty Dashboard: Knowing What Is Owed, Not Guessing
PocketSuite’s royalty dashboard is built to answer a specific, recurring question at a glance: how much is owed from each location, right now. Rather than reconciling a spreadsheet or waiting on a monthly close to know where collections stand, a franchisor can check the dashboard and see outstanding fees by location at any point in the month.
That visibility is what turns royalty collection from a once-a-month scramble into something a franchisor can monitor continuously, catching a location falling behind on payment weeks earlier than a traditional end-of-month reconciliation would surface it.
Choosing Payment Terms: Standard or Location-Specific
Not every location in a system needs to be billed the same way. PocketSuite lets a franchisor set a standard royalty fee for every location, or create location-specific fees and discounts where circumstances call for it, a newer location still ramping up, or a market with a different fee structure negotiated into its franchise agreement. The franchisor also decides whether royalty calculations account for refunds, sales tax, and gratuity, rather than that logic being fixed and identical for every system on the platform.
That flexibility matters because franchise agreements are rarely perfectly uniform in practice, even when the brand standard calls for a single fee structure. Being able to set an exception for a specific location without rebuilding the whole royalty setup is what keeps the system workable as a franchise grows and its agreements accumulate real-world variation.
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Roll-Up Reports for Spotting Royalty Trends
Beyond collecting what is owed today, the Royalty Fees feature includes customizable roll-up reports for discovering trends across the whole system, not just a location-by-location snapshot. A franchisor watching total royalty revenue trend up or down across the system can catch a broader shift, seasonal, competitive, or otherwise, that would be much harder to notice looking at any single location’s numbers in isolation.
Those roll-up royalty reports sit alongside the broader Multi-Location dashboard’s customizable reporting on bookings, revenue, and new clients, so royalty trends do not have to be reviewed as a separate, disconnected report from the rest of the system’s performance.
What This Replaces for a Growing Franchise
For a franchise system that has been collecting royalties through manual invoices, bank transfers tracked in a spreadsheet, or a patchwork of location-by-location arrangements, moving that process into PocketSuite means the billing itself, the reminder to pay, and the record of what is owed all live in one place, tied to the same platform locations already use for bookings and payments.
That consolidation is what makes royalty collection scale with the franchise rather than becoming a bigger administrative burden every time a new location opens.
That same automation also changes the experience for the franchisee, not just the franchisor. A location manager who knows exactly when the royalty bill will arrive, and exactly how it is calculated, whether refunds, sales tax, and gratuity are included, is far less likely to dispute a charge than one receiving an ad hoc invoice with unclear math behind it. Predictable billing, in other words, is not only an efficiency win for the person collecting the royalty, it is part of what keeps a franchise relationship on good terms month after month.
What Happens When a Location Falls Behind
Under a manual collection process, a franchisor often does not find out a location has fallen behind on royalty until the next scheduled reconciliation, sometimes a full month later. With the royalty dashboard showing what is owed from each location in real time, a location falling behind shows up immediately, giving a franchisor time to reach out and understand why, a slow month, a billing dispute, a cash-flow problem, well before it becomes a pattern across multiple billing cycles.
That earlier visibility matters for the health of the franchise relationship overall, not just for collections. A franchisor who can flag a payment issue within days, rather than after it has already compounded for a month or more, has a much easier conversation with that franchisee than one starting from a large, overdue balance.
Feeding Royalty Data Into a Franchisor’s Own Accounting
For franchisors that reconcile royalty income against their own books outside of PocketSuite, PocketSuite’s Enterprise Customization category also includes API access with read and write capabilities, along with custom data exports and webhooks. That is what lets royalty data collected through PocketSuite flow into a franchisor’s own accounting system or financial reporting process, rather than living only inside PocketSuite’s own dashboard.
That export capability is separate from the royalty dashboard and roll-up reports themselves, it is the connective layer for franchisors who need royalty data to show up somewhere else too, not a requirement for using the core royalty billing and collection features day to day.
Royalty Terms as Part of Franchise Onboarding
For a franchisor bringing a new location or franchisee onto the system, royalty terms are one of the settings worth deciding on deliberately before the location’s account goes live, rather than defaulting to whatever the previous location happened to use. Deciding upfront whether the new location gets the system’s standard royalty fee or a negotiated location-specific rate, and whether refunds, sales tax, and gratuity factor into that calculation, avoids a harder conversation later about changing terms after billing has already started.
Because that decision is configured per location rather than fixed platform-wide, a franchisor has room to negotiate real terms with a new franchisee without needing a system-wide policy change to accommodate it, while a franchisor that prefers uniform terms across every location can just apply the same standard fee every time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. PocketSuite generates and sends royalty bills to location managers every month automatically, and location managers can turn on auto-pay so the fee is collected without a manual submission.
Yes. A royalty dashboard shows at a glance how much is owed from each location at any given time, without waiting for a monthly reconciliation.
No. A franchisor can set a standard royalty fee for all locations, or create location-specific fees and discounts for individual locations as needed.
Yes. The franchisor decides whether royalty calculations account for refunds, sales tax, and gratuity, rather than that logic being fixed for every system.
Yes. Royalty roll-up reports sit alongside the broader Multi-Location dashboard’s reporting on bookings, revenue, and new clients.
Chasing royalty payments by hand across a growing number of locations is one of the more thankless parts of running a franchise system, and one of the easiest to automate once billing, collection, and visibility into what is owed all live in the same platform locations are already using every day, rather than spread across bank statements, spreadsheets, and one-off reminder texts to location managers.
PocketSuite’s Royalty Fees feature automates the monthly billing and collection, gives a franchisor a real-time dashboard of what is owed, and leaves room for location-specific terms where a franchise agreement calls for it.
