Excel - Consonance Integration and Automation

Common Integration Use Cases Between Microsoft Excel and Consonance

1. Bulk Title Metadata Import from Excel into Consonance

Publishing teams often maintain title metadata in Excel during acquisition, editorial review, and pre-publication planning. An integration can allow structured Excel templates to be uploaded directly into Consonance to create or update title records in bulk.

• Direction: Microsoft Excel to Consonance
• Business value: Reduces manual data entry, speeds up title setup, and improves metadata consistency across the catalog.
• Typical data: ISBN, title, subtitle, author names, imprint, pub date, format, language, BISAC codes, rights territory, and pricing fields.

2. Editorial and Production Status Export to Excel for Reporting

Consonance can export workflow status, milestone dates, and project assignments into Excel for analysis by editorial, production, and leadership teams. This supports ad hoc reporting, pivot-table analysis, and dashboard creation outside the publishing system.

• Direction: Consonance to Microsoft Excel
• Business value: Enables flexible reporting, trend analysis, and executive visibility into schedule health and bottlenecks.
• Typical data: Manuscript stage, copyediting status, design completion, proofing dates, publication readiness, and overdue tasks.

3. Rights and Royalty Data Reconciliation

Rights and royalty teams can export rights holdings, contract terms, and royalty-related metadata from Consonance into Excel for reconciliation against finance records, agent statements, or external partner reports. Updated corrections can then be reloaded into Consonance after review.

• Direction: Bi-directional
• Business value: Improves accuracy in rights management and royalty administration while reducing disputes and manual reconciliation effort.
• Typical data: Rights territory, license start and end dates, royalty rates, advance status, subrights, and contract exceptions.

4. Cover and Marketing Asset Tracking via Excel Templates

Marketing and production teams frequently track cover approvals, jacket copy, and promotional assets in Excel before finalizing them in Consonance. An integration can ingest asset tracking sheets to update title-linked production records and asset readiness status.

• Direction: Microsoft Excel to Consonance
• Business value: Keeps title metadata aligned with asset delivery timelines and reduces missed publication dependencies.
• Typical data: Asset file names, version numbers, approval status, designer owner, usage rights, and delivery dates.

5. Catalog Cleanup and Metadata Quality Control

Metadata specialists can export title records from Consonance into Excel, apply validation rules, enrich missing fields, and then re-import corrected data. This is especially useful for large backlist cleanup projects or imprint-level catalog standardization.

• Direction: Bi-directional
• Business value: Improves discoverability, retailer feed quality, and downstream distribution accuracy.
• Typical data: Subject codes, contributor names, series information, descriptions, keywords, and format-specific attributes.

6. Publication Schedule Planning and Scenario Modeling

Publishing operations teams can extract title schedules from Consonance into Excel to model launch scenarios, resource constraints, and seasonal release planning. After analysis, revised target dates or sequencing decisions can be pushed back into Consonance.

• Direction: Bi-directional
• Business value: Supports better release planning, capacity management, and risk mitigation across editorial and production teams.
• Typical data: Planned pub dates, production lead times, team capacity, dependency dates, and launch windows.

7. Partner and Retailer Data Preparation

Consonance can provide authoritative title metadata that is exported into Excel for formatting, validation, or transformation before being shared with distributors, retailers, or industry databases that require spreadsheet-based submissions. This helps teams prepare channel-specific files without manually rekeying data.

• Direction: Consonance to Microsoft Excel
• Business value: Speeds partner submissions and reduces errors in externally distributed title data.
• Typical data: Title descriptions, contributor bios, pricing, availability, format details, and channel-specific metadata fields.

8. Cross-Team Exception Management and Approval Tracking

When title data issues are identified in Excel, such as missing metadata, conflicting rights information, or schedule exceptions, the file can be used as a working review sheet and then synchronized back to Consonance once approved. This creates a controlled workflow for exception handling across editorial, legal, and production teams.

• Direction: Bi-directional
• Business value: Creates a clear audit trail for corrections and approvals while reducing email-based coordination.
• Typical data: Exception type, owner, approval status, comments, corrected values, and resolution date.