How to deal with incorrectly reported royalties

All of your data has been set up in Curve, all sales files have been validated and mapped and periods have been run smoothly and accurately. You have even worked through the checklists in Curve’s Onboarding Cheat Sheet and reviewed the Best Practices When Reviewing Your Statement Output. However, there will always be the risk of human error and you might have only spotted an issue after you have reported your royalties. In this article, we will look at a few solutions.

Reprocess the impacted Statements

You could make any changes you need to prevent the same issue from happening again and then simply reprocess any of the impacted Statements. This is probably the simplest and quickest option.

However, we generally advise against reprocessing any Statements that have already been reported to your artists. For example, it could cause confusion if the artist receives the same statement again but this time its details have changed. Though it may be a handy option, as long as the issue and changes are clearly communicated with your artist.

Create an adjustment as a Transaction

Once you have worked out exactly what royalties have been incorrectly reported and which Contracts have been been impacted by this, you could go into the Transactions tab for each Contract and create a new Transaction which adds/removes earnings from their balance. If you set the Transaction Date to a date between the Start and End Date of your next Period, then this Transaction will adjust the balance of the next statement for this Contract. These adjustments will then be viewable alongside all of their other Transactions in their Curve portal and also their PDF statements.

The downside of this option is that not a lot of detail is provided in this transaction. If the adjustment relates to specific Tracks or types of revenue, and you wish to provide that level of detail in your adjustment, then we suggest the next option instead.

Upload your adjustments as a Sales file

A little more complex than the previous option, but perhaps the most transparent and detailed option is to import an adjustment file to be included in your next Period. For example, if you have accidentally uploaded a sales file that should not have been reported, you could upload that same sales file with negative amounts to compensate for over reporting in a previous Period. This option will allow the affected artists to view any relevant data in their CSV statements. The adjustment would not be displayed as a transaction on the PDF statement, but would simply be included in the total earnings breakdown on the PDF.

This solution works particularly well if you are a distributor reporting to labels (who in turn will need to report the revenue to their artists), because any adjustments are simply included in the CSV statement and the label can carry on with their reporting processes as usual.

To review what has been over- or under-reported, you could create a Report similar to below so that you can see the incorrect sales data for that Track.

This Report can then be exported and pasted into our Standard Master Template. Before ingesting this file into Curve, you can adjust the sales data on a pre-calculation level so that Curve applies the corrections whilst it is calculating the sales during the next Period run.