Organising your Payments on Curve ✪

Once you have created statements on Curve, you will have balances that are payable to your songwriters. Via Curve’s Payments tool you can organise and trigger your royalty payments.

1. Set the Standard CSV option as your Payment Provider option

Your preferred payment provider can be configured by going to your Settings > General > Payments tab. Please select the Standard CSV option.

2. Providing your Payee’s bank details

Key to making payments is of course storing your songwriter's bank details. This info will be stored against your Payees. To get started, please go to your Payees page and click into the Payee you wish to add payment details for. In this Payee, please complete the relevant fields in the Payment Details area.

Please be aware, only Admin users have the right to add or adjust bank details on a Payee.

Payment Email - A payment email can be stored for your reference. We don't currently have an integration with Paypal, but it is on our roadmap to look into shortly.

Payment Currency - In which currency do you wish to pay this specific Payee? This currency is used when generating any manual payments to the payee, whilst any automated payment amounts created from your statements will use the contract currency. Ideally the Payment Currency matches the Contract Currency.

Bank Details - The Bank Name, Bank Address, Account Number, Sort Code and IBAN fields can be used to provide payment details where required.

3. Creating Payment Groups

Once you have configured your Payment settings and provided your Payee’s bank details, you are ready to start making payments. On Curve, payments are always made as part of a Payment Group. A Payment Group will hold all the pending payment transactions, ready for you to approve them and mark them as paid.

There are three ways in which you can create a Payment Group and subsequent Payments.

1. By enabling Auto-Payments in your Contracts - If at least one Contract in your Period has the Auto-Payment functionality enabled and has a payable balance (i.e. the balance is higher than the Minimum Payout threshold), then a Payment Group holding these Auto-Payments will automatically be created.

   
   

   If you reprocess the Period which results in changes to the balances of your payable Contracts, the amount of unpaid payment prompts will automatically be updated to the new amount. However, as soon as at least one payment in a payment group has been fully approved and paid, you will no longer be able to reprocess the linked Period. So please only start approving payments once you are confident your Period is complete.

2. By triggering a Payment in a Statement - Alternatively, you can manually trigger a statement’s closing balance to be created as a payment. All payments that are triggered within the same Period on Curve will automatically be created as part of the same Payment Group.

   

   If you reprocess the Period which results in changes to the balances of your payable Contracts, Curve will not automatically update the payable amount of previously triggered pending payment transactions. However, you can create an additional payment prompt that will cover the difference between the new balance and the initial payment prompt.

3. By manually creating a Payment Group and manually creating Payments - A final option is to create the entire Payment Group and all of its Payments manually. The payments will be created loose from any Periods or Statements on Curve.

   

4. Triggering Payments in Curve

Once you have created your pending payment transactions on Curve and are ready to start making payments, you can export the payment details and automatically mark all these transactions as paid within the Payment Groups page.

There are three ways to trigger these.

1. By selecting Pay > Pay All from the button in the top right. - This will provide you with a CSV that includes all payment transactions that are valid to be paid. Any payments for which payment information is missing will automatically be left out of the CSV. (as per the example below)
2. By selecting those Payments which you want to pay using the checkboxes on the left of the table, and hitting Pay > Pay Selected - This will provide you with a CSV that includes just those selected payment transactions and its details. Any payments for which payment information is missing will automatically be left out of the CSV.
3. By going into a single Payment, and hitting Pay in the top right - This will mark just this one payment transaction as paid and send you an accompanying CSV with the payment details.

5. Independently make your Payments

As you are working with the Standard CSV option, marking payments as paid on Curve is just a formality and a way for you to organise your payments.

Now that you have marked payments as paid, you will need to make payments to your songwriters to make sure any transactions and balances created on Curve reflect what your songwriters received in their bank account.