Best Practices when Reviewing Your Payments & Payment Groups

Once you have completed your Statements on Curve and have created a Payment Group which holds all the Payments that you wish to transfer, you are ready to pay your artists/writers.

Before Making Payments

There are a few checks we advise users to do before starting to make Payments

Are your Period and its Statements accurate and complete?

Since the Payments are based on the payable balances of your Contracts, which are calculated as part of a Period and its Statements, we of course strongly recommend that you only start processing payments once you feel confident that these Statements are correct.

We have created a checklist which we recommend every label and publisher to go through whenever they finish a Period calculation on Curve (regardless of whether they make use of Curve's payment functionality or not). You can find this checklist here for labels and here for publishers.

Once at least one Payment in a Payment Group has been paid, you will no longer be able to reprocess your Period. So please make sure that you only start making Payments when you feel confident that your Period is complete and won't be reprocessed again in the future.

Are there Payments with a "Missing Info" status?

If there are Payments with a "Missing Info" status, it means that there are no Payment Details stored against this Payee. You or the artist/writer will need to complete the Payment Details before Curve will be able to make this payment.

It is possible for you to pay all Payments with a Pending status, and come back to complete the Payments with a "Missing Info" status another time.

Are there still unpaid Payments in the Payment Groups from your previous Period?

If you have any Payment Groups on Curve from previous Periods, you may wish to review if there are still unpaid Payments lingering from your last process. It would be fine for you to either:

• Leave those Payments as unpaid and revisit these again another time. Please note that a Transaction on the Contract will exist and thus the Contract will act as if this Payment has been paid.
• Delete this unpaid Payment from the Payment group, this would also delete the Transaction on the Contract. And adjust the Payment transaction in the current group. Either by manually adjusting it, or by deleting the Payment transaction and recreating one. Since the Transaction from the previous Period has been deleted, the new Payment transaction would reflect the new balance which reflects the total amount that is still payable. This would be helpful if you would prefer to send just one Payment to your Payee, rather than separate Payments across the different Payment Groups.

Are there sufficient funds on your Payment Balances?

Check if your payment balances hold sufficient funds to successfully process all payments in your group. If there are not sufficient payment balances on your account to complete all payments, then payments would error as soon as you run out of funds.

• Curve will make the Payment in the preferred Payment Currency which was specified by the artist/writer/user when providing the Payment Details.
• If there is no or no sufficient balance in this Payee Currency, then Curve will use the Payment Balance in the Contract Currency and exchange this to the Payment Currency to make this Payment.
• If there is no sufficient balance in this Contract Currency, then the Payment will fail and you will need to top up this balance before retrying to make this Payment.

You can review the total Payments and the total amounts in each Currency by going into your Payment Group and hitting the "Export" button. This will give you an overview of all Payments to be made in an excel format.

Once you know how much you need for each Payment Balance, you can top up your Payment Balances.

For ease, you may decide to make sure you have sufficient balances in each of your Contract Currencies, and have Curve automatically exchange the balance from the Contract Currency to the Payee Currency where applicable. Please note that a 2% conversion fee will apply. We recommend making sure there are sufficient balances in the individual Payee Currencies by topping up these balances directly from an account in that currency if you wish to avoid this fee.

After Making Payments

Once you have made Payments, please review the outcome of this process. Ideally, all Payments now have a Paid status. But it is possible that some or all Payments have failed due to an insufficient balance in your account, incorrect bank account details, or perhaps a technical issue.

If there are payments with a Payment Error status, please review the error message to resolve the respective issue and try again.

A list of all Payment Statuses, and a clarification for common Payment Error statuses, can be found here: Payment Statuses & Errors in a Payment Group