Best Practices When Reviewing Your Statement Output

Once your songwriter's statements are complete, there are a number of checks you can make to guarantee your statements are as accurate and clear as should be. In this article, we provide six valuable tips to review your Period ahead of distributing your statements.

Is there no unreported income?

It may be that some income included in your Period is not reported successfully to a statement. This may be due to an incomplete setup resulting in Curve not having all the necessary variables to be able to report your income to a songwriter. Curve will flag this unreported income in the Unreported Sales CSV and Fixed Report for the Unreported Sales ✪. Click here for more information on how to resolve your Unreported sales or costs.

Are the Sources & Sub Sources clear and consistent?

It may occur that the Source data provided to you is not in a standardised format. Source data across different income files may be provided to you in an inconsistent format (think YouTube vs Youtube vs YOUTUBE, for example). This will result in your revenue from one source to be scattered across different Sources in your Analytics on Curve.

Are the Sale & Transaction Dates accurate?

Sale & Transaction Dates are mandatory to complete, though it may be that the dates in your sales files were provided in an odd format and therefore not read by Curve as expected. By running a Report, you can quickly review all the Sale & Transaction Dates used in your Period. You can add a Sales File ID field to your Report to unveil which sales files should be reviewed, and use the Export button on your report page to export this list in an Excel format.

To guarantee Curve reads your Sale & Transaction Dates as expected, you may need to adjust the Data Type of the column in your template. An excel date can be read by the Date Type Date, but when dates are stored in a different format by the source, you may need to set the Data Type to other options such as YYYYMMDD, or MM-DD-YYYY.

Is the Start Date and End Date of your Period correct?

Only Transactions that fall between the Start and End Date of your Period will be displayed on the Statement. Any transactions before the Start Date will be considered as the Opening Balance, any transactions after the End Date will only be considered in the next Period.

The Start Date should be one day after the End Date of your previous Period for this Accounting Period Type. The End Date should be the date you wish to use as the cut-off day for Advances and Payments. Any Advances and Payments that are set with a date after the End Date of your Period will not yet be recouped. More information can be found here.

Were all Aliases matched to the correct Work in your catalogue?

Upon income ingestion, when the work Identifier was not recognised by Curve, you would have been asked to map this as an alias to the correct Work in your catalogue via the Unmapped page. You can efficiently review all the aliases that have historically been mapped to your catalogue by running a Report. By comparing the Original Work Title and Original Composers (those provided to you in the initial income file) with the Work Title and Composer of the mapped Work, you can review whether the alias had been mapped correctly.

Does the total Participation Rate of all of your Works add up to 100?

When the total participation rates of all Contracts assigned to one Work add up to 100, that means all the income of your Work is split nicely between the different Contracts. If the total participation rate adds up to less than 100, it means not all the income of this Work will be funnelled to a Contract. If the total participation rate adds up to more than 100, it means the total calculation input of the attached Contracts will be higher than the earnings of this Work.

There are some scenarios where a total Participation Rate of more than 100 is required (such as a sub-publishing scenario where you report to both the Publisher and Composer. But gerally, it will make sense for all your Works to have a total participation rate of 100. Anything more or less may suggest you will need to review the Contracts assigned to this Work. The total Participation Rate can be reviewed by using the Participation filter on your Works page.

Do all Payees, Contracts and Catalogue have a Valid status?

To successfully report royalties on Curve, it is important all Payees, Contracts and Catalogue are accurately created. We have validation rules that will instantly provide feedback when you save a Payee, Contract, Track or Release. For example, we may flag that your Track doesn't have a Contract assigned, or that your Contract doesn't have an Accounting Period Type specified.

When one of the Payees, Contracts or Catalogue items has an incomplete status; it will not stop your royalty processes from completing. It solely flags that some issues or inaccuracies may occur and gives you an opportunity to review and resolve topics that are flagged. (More info)

Are there Contracts that have earned substantially more or less than in the previous Period?

By taking the statement breakdown from two separate Periods, you can compare whether certain Contracts have earned an unexpected amount which may suggest mistakes were made when setting up or adjusting certain Catalogue or Contracts.

Did all Contracts have a correct Accounting Period Type?

For example, when creating a Period for the Accounting Period Type Monthly, Curve will only include and create a statement for your Monthly Contracts. Any Contracts with a Half-Yearly, Quarterly or blank accounting period type would be excluded from your Period. Do all of your Contracts have a correct Accounting Period Type? If not, they would have automatically been left out of your Period.

You can quickly review the accounting period types by exporting all of your Contracts in an Excel template and reviewing the Accounting Period Type column.

Are your statement's Custom Text up to date?

Via your Settings, you have the possibility to customise your statements by adding a logo, a help email and a custom text. Is this information up to date?

Please make sure your custom texts include relevant information such as the minimum payout, how or when the artist can expect to get paid, and if the artist has to take any further action such as raising an invoice. Additionally, make sure a help email is provided so your artists know who to reach out to in case they have any further questions.

Click here for more information on how to customise your statement design.

Is your Period locked & are your income files archived?

Once you are happy with your Period and are not intending to make any further changes before sending your statements; it is best practice to Lock your Period. This will make sure nobody accidentally makes any further changes to this Period or reprocesses any statements in this Period. More info

Additionally we also advise to Archive your reported sales files and costs. This hides the respective sales files and costs from your Sales and Costs page, enabling you to work from a blank canvas for your next Period. More info

Have you taken an export of your data?

We recommend to take an export of your Payees, Contracts, or Catalogue at the end of each royalty Period. This way, if changes are made to your data in the future, and you want to reference a royalty statement with how your metadata was set up at the time, these exports may be helpful. Furthermore, if any changes were made in error, these exports could be used as a reference to reinstate certain Payees, Contracts or Catalogue items to a previous form.