Software for Newport Beach & Costa Mesa

[The businesses here]

Who I work with in Newport Beach

Two economies again: one managing other people’s capital, one managing product and brands. Both are fee or royalty based rather than simple sell-and-invoice, which is exactly where standard accounting tooling runs out.

• Brand licensees and apparel operators

  Operating a brand under licence rather than owning it. That means tracking sell-through by brand and channel, computing royalties per licence agreement, and reconciling against wholesale order books and retail settlements. Three data sources per brand, multiplied by the number of licences held.

• Investment managers and advisers

  Fees calculated off assets under management, daily position and valuation reconciliation, client reporting on fixed cycles, and a heavy compliance overlay on top.

• Insurance carriers and distribution

  Policy administration, illustration and suitability paperwork, producer commission accounting and statutory reporting, generally across systems bought at different times.

• Commercial real estate owners and operators

  Rent rolls, lease abstraction, annual CAM reconciliation against monthly estimates, percentage rent based on tenant sales reporting, capital project tracking and investor reporting.

• Luxury retail and hospitality operators

  High-ticket, low-SKU inventory, clienteling by associate, consignment and appraisal paperwork, and landlord percentage rent reporting that has to reconcile to the point of sale.

[What slows them down]

The usual bottlenecks

1. 01

   Royalty accounting is not product accounting

   A licensee owes royalties calculated per licence agreement, on definitions of net sales that differ between agreements, across wholesale, retail and e-commerce channels that each report differently. Getting it wrong in the brand owner’s favour is expensive and getting it wrong the other way invites an audit.

   What it costs: A quarterly calculation with real money on both sides, currently done in a spreadsheet.

2. 02

   CAM reconciliation once a year, from twelve months of estimates

   Tenants are billed monthly estimates and reconciled annually against actual operating expense. The reconciliation pulls from the general ledger, the lease terms and each tenant’s pro rata share, most of which lives in lease documents rather than in a system. In a soft office market, where Orange County vacancy sat at 13.3 percent in the second quarter of 2026, tenants read those statements much more carefully.

   What it costs: Weeks of annual work, producing statements that get disputed line by line.

3. 03

   Percentage rent depends on the tenant telling you

   Retail leases with percentage rent require tenant sales reporting, which arrives late, in inconsistent formats, and sometimes not at all. Chasing it is somebody’s recurring job, and the numbers are hard to sanity check.

   What it costs: Rent that cannot be billed until a tenant sends a spreadsheet.

4. 04

   Billing blocked behind a reconciliation

   For an investment manager, the fee cannot be invoiced until custodial positions and valuations agree with the firm’s own records at period end. A break in that reconciliation does not just delay a report, it delays revenue.

   What it costs: Revenue recognition gated by a data problem rather than a commercial one.

[What a fix looks like]

A licensee that can calculate royalties on demand