Elaine Lee-Chaperon
Senior Manager, Royalties
Joined The Orchard in November 2007
Let’s get straight to business: What the #&@$ do you do?
I am the Queen of Travelex payments. Other than that dubious title, I also process monthly and quarterly royalty payments, create manual physical statements, answer questions from Project Managers, Client Managers, Client Services and labels. There is a list of others things that I do behind the scenes for statements, but I won’t bore you with all the details.
Aww, come on, don’t sell your job short! We want to know! What details are you hiding from us?
It’s a lot of the behind the scenes work that needs to be done in order to have the smoothest payment process. We have a tickler [note: a tickler is the accounting way to say a list of terms or checklist] to review before making monthly and quarterly payments — making sure any advances are applied, manual adjustments such as withholding tax and check fee, calculate flow thru payments, create CRM tickets to hold payments due to bad address/bad banking info and sending updated label information to Paychex. Bored yet?
Nope! What do Travelex payments entail?
I help create new Travelex campaigns for labels to enroll. That includes approving their enrollments and banking updates, adding the enrollment link to the Workstation, updating labels to payment type “Travelex” in OA [our backend administrative system] and working with Travelex to get payments reprocessed by reaching out to labels for correct banking information. Every month and quarter, I create a payment file for Accounts Payable to upload for royalties to be paid out. It totals to over 2,500 payments.
Sheesh! Queen of Travelex, indeed!
I’ve heard you and Pete Cairis go way back and that your relationship has been quite tumultuous…! How did you go from never wanting to work for Pete at Sony to being on the same team at The Orchard?
I joined Sony’s royalty department in 1998. Peter was with Epic label group and I was doing copyright royalties. As I moved from copyright royalties to artist royalties with the Columbia group, I dealt with Peter more. It was mainly with monthly journal entries and clearing out holding accounts. I was friendly with his staff and they would share their experience of working with him… some involving tears… I came to The Orchard from Universal to help Peter with quarterly payments. Someone left from his group and he was in a crutch, so I stepped in. After a couple of days of working with him, I realized that this was a more mellow Peter. He was quite different back in his Sony days compared to now. Also, Peter has a lot of stories to tell about his life experiences and they never get old. I am amazed that he is alive after hearing some of his adventures!
You have the privilege and the curse of sitting on the fourth floor of our office. Can you tell us how it’s a privilege and how it’s a curse?
I have the privilege of having toned legs and a great cardio workout everyday. We have a private bathroom and I am in the company of some great people. It’s a curse temperature wise — in that in the summer, it’s the arctic circle and in the winter, it’s the Sahara desert.
Thanks for sharing what the #&@$ you do, your highness! Uhm, I mean Elaine… Stay warm!
favorite thing to do in the summer: Relaxing with friends at the lake, beach or pool
favorite TV show: Friends is my all time favorite. Currently, Game of Thrones.
first album ever: Heart – Bad Animals
random fact: I am older than I look and I have 2 kids, 3 years and 10 months.
