Using Auto-Payments to Automatically Create Transactions

To know whether you should use the Auto-Payment function, ask yourself; do you instantly pay your artist when a royalty is due? Or do you require your artist to invoice you?

If you instantly pay your artist when a royalty is due, then the Auto-Payment function will be a helpful tool. When Auto-Payment is enabled, as soon as the balance of your Contract reaches the Minimum Payout, Curve will trigger a Payment. This will (1) notify you a Payment is due to be paid to your artist and (2) automatically mark the balance as paid.

Enabling Auto-Payment in Your Contract

We have designed a module for Auto-Payments that can be enabled below the Finances area of your Contract. You can also enable Self-Billing, which will automatically create a PDF Invoice on behalf of the artist for the amount of the Auto-Payment.

You can set a Minimum Payout that will restrict Curve to only create an Auto-Payment once the Balance reaches a certain amount. Furthermore, you can add additional conditions to the Auto-Payment, such as stating a payment for this Contract should only be triggered under the condition that another Contract has a positive balance also (in case you only wish to pay a producer once the main artist has recouped their costs, for example).

The Auto-Payment in Action

When you have finalised your Period, you can view all the created Auto-Payments in one place via the Statements Export. It is important that you pay these amounts to your artists, to guarantee your Payments match the Transactions created on Curve.

You can view all these Auto-Payments individually on the Transactions tab of your Contract. In the below example, we can see our artist has earned 16,278.73 and that Curve has created an Auto-Payment of -16,278.73, essentially marking this balance as paid. This guarantees the current balance of your Contract is zero, ensuring the next statement will start counting from zero again.