Patent & Trademark Portfolio Budgets: Families and Countries, Renewal Fee Schedules, Due-Date Calendars, Keep-or-Drop Decisions & Cost per Product

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn the case list of a fictional sensor maker into a portfolio map: fees per family for the cases that are still alive, the average fee per active case, how many old cases sit before the high-fee cut-off and the oldest active filing.
• Work out the age of every patent case in the budget year, look up its renewal fee from a fictional schedule with age bands and country columns, and add up the trademark renewals that fall due in that year.
• Build a renewal calendar: the due date on the filing anniversary with EDATE, the end of a fictional grace period, the status of each planned payment and the amount that will really be paid, including surcharges.
• Convert renewal fees from four fictional currencies into the budget currency, add a safety buffer for exchange-rate moves and a service fee per case, and find out how much of the bill is service rather than official fees.
• Turn a case-by-case fee forecast into a family-by-year grid with SUMIFS, add five-year totals and year totals and measure how fast the portfolio's cost grows with a compound growth rate.
• Score each patent family on four weighted criteria, divide its five-year cost by the score to see what each point of value costs, apply a fictional keep / review / drop rule and name the most expensive family per point.
• Mark the cases the review wants to drop, compare the five-year forecast before and after pruning, express the saving in percent and show how much one country contributes to it.
• Allocate each family's fees to the products that use it, compare the allocated cost with each product's budget, flag the products over budget and chart allocated cost against budget.