Getting Started: The Onboarding Process

In this guide, we will walk you through the entire platform in the order that will make the most sense for you to onboard your data and create your statements.

The Onboarding Process

To onboard your business & create your first statements, there are eight steps you will need to walk through. Every step in the process builds onto the next one, so it’s important to following this order so you don’t waste your time putting the cart before the horse!
  1. Customise your Client’s Settings – Here you configure your client & specify the building blocks for your data. More info
  2. Create a Payee for every artist – Each Payee represents a statement beneficiary. By creating a Payee, you essentially create an artist portal. More info
  3. Create a Contract for every artist – Here you define your artist deals and their terms. Each artist will need their own Contract, and each Contract will be mapped to a Payee. More info
  4. Add your Catalogue – This is where you build your Releases and Tracks. Each Track or Release is associated with one or many contracts, so you will need your Contracts in place in order to complete this step. More info
  5. Import your Sales data – When dropping your statements onto our sales page, Curve will instantly recognise, import & map down your sales data. Our Templates handle hundreds of different statement formats from an equal amount of sources. More info
  6. Create your Costs – Add your costs, using the user interface or via Excel upload. More info
  7. Run your Period & Create Statements – After all of your sales and costs are ready, you can now pull it all together as part of a Period & create your Statements. More info
  8. Give artists access to their portal – When creating Users, you artists will instantly receive an invitation to the Curve platform & gain access to their royalty statements. More info

For example, let's say you are working with the artist The Curves and have released their debut album We Are Royals. You will need to create a Payee for The Curves where they can collect their statements, then create a Contract for The Curves where you specify their royalty rates and link it back to their Payee, then create their recordings on the album as Tracks and create the album We Are Royals as a Release and connect these to The Curves contract. Once this metadata is ready you can start ingesting your sales files and costs which will connect to the Tracks & Releases. And finally you can create a Period which will bundle these sales, apply The Curves' royalty rates and create a statement with a balance that is payable to the artist. Once you invite your artist as a User on Curve, they will be able to view their statement in their Payee portal.

Onboarding Metadata via Excel

In step 2 to 4; adding your Payees, Contracts and Catalogue via Curve’s user interface is one way of doing so. But more efficiently for large datasets, you can import data using the available Excel templates. For the best user experience, we advise using Microsoft Excel rather than alternatives.
At the top right of every Payee, Contract and Catalogue page in Curve you will see an Import & Export button. Using the Import button will allow you to upload large sets of data at once using our Excel templates. Using the Export button will again export this data in our Excel format, ready for you to make changes to and reimport. The green ‘Download Template’ button will provide you with a blank template.

There is a different template depending on which page of Curve you are looking to set up. To import metadata in bulk, the concept is simple and the same for each import template. Simply fill in the columns as specified in the column headers, save your file, and upload it to Curve using the Import button at the top right of your screen. The system will import the file in the background & send you a notification once complete.

If an Excel template looks daunting at first, try building a complex example using the web interface. Then export these examples to Excel, so that you can replicate the structure for other similar examples for your business. Curve uses exactly the same excel structures to both export & import data. More info

Take a Look at Our Demo Data

Sometimes the best way to learn is to learn from example. That's why we have a "Demo Mode" on Curve. Simply enabling this mode, you will view a client which has pre-populated data for you to look at as a reference. Whilst in demo mode you will be unable to save any changes.

Simply turning off "Demo Mode" will bring you back to your own client, where you can add, update and process information as usual again.

Now, let’s get started. Please follow us to step 1 of using Curve: configuring your Settings.
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