ANNUITY SERVICE
The Annuity Service setting allows you to activate, create, and/or modify a default set of user fees for patent, design and utility model annuities across a 20-year period. Only application types available for the country selected will be available. You may create a set of defaults for any country and application type needed by filling in the annuities and hitting the UPDATE button after each country.

You may also enter annuities for ‘All Countries’, which is useful if you are paying a standard rate for all countries to an annuity service provider. The ‘All Countries’ values will be in effect unless overridden by any specific country values that are defined. Countries that have user-set annuities are highlighted in red.

You may also create counsel-specific (Primary Counsel Fee Rules) annuity settings.

The "show only countries with custom settings" option when selected, shows only the countries with the custom values.

To change the currency being used for these fees, click on the 'Currency' drop-down list and select a currency from the list.
438
User Fee Options

After entering the annuities, review the options listed below the annuities (as shown in the figure).

439
Click the 'Activate Fee Rules' checkbox to activate the set of fees. When the 'Activate Fee Rules' box is unchecked, the program ignores all annuity values on this section of the screen. You do not need to delete the values if you wish to switch between the 'user-defined' versus the system default fees. If you wish to revert to the system default fees, simply uncheck the ‘Activate Fee Rules’ box.

Either ‘Use these Fee Rules Exclusively’ or ‘Add To System Fee Rules’ option can be selected. Click the 'Use these Fee Rules Exclusively’ option to replace system default fees with these ‘user-defined’ fees. Click the 'Add To System Fee Rules' to add these ‘user-defined’ fees to the system default fees.

‘Include VAT%’ is the percentage of Value Added Tax, which is applicable for some countries. This checkbox is only available for countries that have VAT. You can enable the checkbox to add VAT% to the user associate fees entered on this screen for all applicable countries. This also allows you to exclude VAT by unchecking this option, when the amount you entered already includes it.

At a later point if there are any changes in the annuity charges for a country/all countries, you can use the ‘Adjust annuities by percentage’ box on the Edit Annuities screen to adjust the values earlier defined in annuity fields instead of changing each specific field.

To remove annuities previously specified for a country (or all countries) and revert them to the system default value (denoted by zero ‘0’), check the ‘Reset Values’ checkbox.

When finished, click the UPDATE button to save the changes. Click the BACK button to exit the Edit Annuities screen.

x