Reporting Previously Unreported Sales
When creating, reviewing and locking your Period; the ideal scenario is of course for all sales lines to have been reported perfectly, via all applicable Contracts, into a statement. In reality, there may be cases where you've had to close and deliver your Period, whilst cases of unreported sales lines were yet to be resolved and some included sales files still had an Unreported or Partially Reported status. This may be because you did not have all necessary information at the time. In this article, we will discuss the possible options to report those sales in the future again, and the considerations to make with each option.
Dropping a New Contract into an Old Period
Perhaps the unreported royalties are for an artist who you had not yet created a Contract for, meaning no statement would have been created for this artist at all. In this scenario, the simplest solution is to simply drop the new Contract into your closed Period. This will create a statement for this Contract, as if the Contract would have been included when the Period was last processed. The statement can be published and sent, or simply published and have its closing balance carried forward to the next Period. The sales that were previously unreported and have now been reported into this Contract, will now have a reported status. The Unreported CSV of your Period would be updated accordingly.
Considerations to make
- This method will update the reported revenue stats in your (previously closed) Period.
Reprocessing a Statement in a Closed Period
Alternatively, it may be that the unreported revenue is due for a Contract which had already been included in that Period. Perhaps the royalty had not completed calculation, because the Contract was not linked to the respective Track/Release, or did not have a matching term specifying a valid royalty rate. In this instance, you can't simply drop a new Contract into the old Period. Instead, you could fix the issue and reprocess the statement, though this comes with some specific drawbacks.
Considerations to make
- This method will update the existing statement. So if the statement had already been sent to the artist, please note that this method would mean the statement on Curve may have a different balance than what had been previously sent to the artist.
- This method will update the reported revenue stats in your (previously closed) Period.
- When reprocessing an old statement, please note that also any newer statements for that same Contract should be reprocessed, to make sure that any changes in balance are also reflected on the newer statements. It is necessary for the statements to be reprocessed chronologically, and for the next to be reprocessed only once the previous one has finished reprocessing, so that the closing balance of the previous statement will be used as opening balance for the next.
Reincluding Your Sales Files Into the Next Period
Another option is to reinclude the sales files from your previous Period into the next Period. Curve remembers the reported status of your sales lines, and will not report the same sales line to the same contract again. Thus the calculation would only calculate a royalty when a given sales line had not been reported to the same Contract in a previous Period.
Curve looks at each sales line on a per Contract basis. So a sales line that is linked to a Track with two Contracts, if the line was successfully reported to Contract A but not to Contract B in a given Period; if the sales line is reincluded in the next Period, Curve will not try to report that same sales line to Contract A again, but it will try to report it to Contract B successfully this time.
There are important considerations to make when following this workflow. So please make sure to fully read and understand the considerations below first.
Considerations to make:
- When reincluding sales files from previous Periods into a new Period, it is extremely important that those sales files have not been Reingested since that Period was last (re)processed. Reingesting a sales file is the equivalent of deleting a sales file and uploading it again, so Curve will no longer remember the reported status of these sales lines. Subsequently, reprocessing the Period would reinstate those reported statuses. So if you were to reinclude a sales file that was reingested after any of the Periods it's included in have been last (re)processed, Curve would report all those sales lines again. More information on this can be found here: When You Should Not Reingest Partially or Fully Reported Sales Files
- Be mindful when Contracts have been replaced. As mentioned, Curve looks at reporting the sales lines on a per Contract basis. If a Track was linked to Contract A in the first Period, you then link this Track to Contract B instead, if the sales from the first Period are included again in the next Period, then Curve will try to report all these sales lines to Contract B even though they have been reported to Contract A already. In many cases, this would be desired. For example, if you overlooked that royalties were still to be reported to a Producer, this allows you to report royalties to your Producer in the next Period. However, there are cases where you would not want to report these to a second Contract. For example, perhaps the rights have been transferred from one Contract to another, meaning all sales from previous Periods should not be reported to the new Contract. This could be mitigated by dropping the new Contract into the previous Contracts with a royalty rate of 0%, so that Curve knows those sales lines are reported at 0% and should not be reported at any different royalty rate in any future Periods.
- Continuously reincluding sales files in future Periods will increase calculation times. When all sales files from all previous Periods are consistently added to any new Periods, that will mean the size of your Periods will continuously increase over time. This would result in increased royalty calculation times, as Curve has to shift through each sales line to review whether this line has already been reported to all applicable Contracts or not. For this reason, we suggest to be selective in including previously reported sales files into new Periods, or to consider some of the alternative options when more suitable.