Setting the Opening Balance of Your Contract

When onboarding your data to Curve, it is very likely that you will have Contracts for which there are still royalties due to be paid, or for which there are unrecouped costs or advances in play. Via the Opening Balance, you can set a starting point for your Contract to start calculating royalties. This amount is stored in the Contract's Currency.

How to Set the Opening Balance on Curve

We have a designated field on the Contract to add an ongoing balance. When you populate the Opening Balance field, it will automatically be added as a starting point on your Contract's Transactions page, which will track all the royalty statements' output, Payments or Advances.

Please note, it's best practice to set the Opening Balance of your Contract when no statement has been created yet. As soon as you run your first statement for this Contract, updating the opening balance means you will need to rerun your statement(s) to reflect the update.

In a Royalty and Flexible Profit Share deals, Curve will apply a royalty rate % to every single sales line and cost line. Therefore, the Contract's balance will always reflect the total artist share that needs to be paid or recouped. Therefore, when setting your Opening Balance, make sure this figure equals the artist's share of the outstanding royalties, unrecouped costs or unrecouped advances.

The Opening Balance in a Classic Profit Share Deal

A Classic Profit Share's balance is only split into an artist share when there is a profit. A negative balance will therefore represent the total loss of the Contract. A positive balance will represent the total artist share of the profit.

In the example of an 80% Classic Profit Share Contract; if there is a total loss of -£1000, the Contract's balance will equal -£1000. If there is a total profit of £1000, the Contract's Profit Share % will be applied and the balance will equal £800 ( = £1000 x 80%).

You will also need to consider this when setting the Opening Balance of your Classic Profit Share deals.

• If the Contract is in profit, and this profit is still unpaid, then you will need to add the artist's share of the profit as the Opening Balances.
• If the Contract is still in loss, then you will need to add the total loss of the Contract as the Opening Balance.
• Any unrecouped advances should be added as a Transaction to the Contract.