Patent work runs on three clocks — office-action responses, annual annuities, and the PCT national-phase window. Here’s how each becomes structured, trackable data instead of margin notes.
Patent prosecution is deadline work of a different intensity than trademarks: office actions with statutory response windows, annuities due year after year in every jurisdiction, and the PCT national-phase deadline that decides where protection will ever exist. IPBases models each as structured data on the patent record — the same discipline it applies to trademark docketing, tuned to patent practice.
Each office action is recorded against the patent with its response deadline, the rejected claim numbers it targets, and — once the attorney answers — the response filed date that closes it out. The result is an examination history you can read at a glance: which claims drew objections, when, and how long each response took. Claims themselves are tracked on the record, so “which claims survived” is data, not archaeology through PDF correspondence.
Annuity rows carry the year number, due date, amount and currency, and a one-click mark paid — building a payment ledger per patent per jurisdiction. The same engine handles industrial design renewals, so registered designs get the identical treatment. And because it lives beside the billing module, the annuity you pay the office and the invoice you send the client stay in one system, in the right currencies.
A PCT application is a list of decisions waiting to happen: for every designated country, will the client enter the national phase? IPBases records the designated countries on the PCT filing and gives each an explicit enter action — converting the designation into national-phase work when the client commits, and leaving a clean record of the countries deliberately let go. The 30/31-month window stops being a note in the margin and becomes trackable state per country.
The point isn’t that IPBases replaces a US patent boutique’s PTO-rules engine — it’s that firms handling trademarks, patents and designs together, as most GCC and international practices do, get all three on one client record, one deadline dashboard, one audit trail and one bill. That’s the promise the phrase patent and trademark management software actually makes — and where single-asset tools quietly fail it.
Office actions, annuities and PCT national phase tracked beside your trademarks and designs — one portfolio, one audit trail, one bill.
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