Below is a 14-step checklist you can follow. This makes sure you don’t overlook any tasks & may inform you of handy tips & tricks.

1. Are your Settings complete? Make sure you have a Custom Statement Text & Support Email set. For more best practices on how to configure your settings please visit this chapter.

2. Make sure your Period has a name that is descriptive, clean & consistent with your previous Periods. This name will be used on the statements & transactions on your contracts.

3. Check you selected the correct Start & End Date. The Start Date picks up the Opening Balance from the transaction tab on the contracts & the End Date posts the closing balance ready for future transactions. Any transactions (such as payments & advances) that fall outside of this timezone will not be part of the Statement Of Account. As a rule of thumb;

• The Start Date should be one day after the End Date of your last Period.
• The End Date should either be the last day of your accounting period (eg 31st of March for Q1, 30th of June for H1, …) if you don’t want payments/advances paid after that date to be reflected in the Closing Balances. Or should be the day that you last reprocess your Period, if you want payments/advances paid up to the moment you run your Period to be reflected in the Closing Balance.
• The Accounting Date should be the day you intend to publish & send your statements.

4. Make sure you include all the correct Sales & Costs files. For this reason, it is best practice to always complete your Target Period field & do so in a consistent manner when uploading sales or costs. It allows you to filter & include all needed Sales & Costs with one click of a button.

5. Once a Period has finished processing, review the key statistics on the overview tab. This will be your first clue to find mistakes in your setup in case any statistics seem incomplete or incorrect.

6. Download the Unreported Sales & Unreported Costs file to figure out what causes these sales & cost lines to be unreported (one of four causes mentioned in the Period chapter in our Documentation) & fix the issue. This file is updated once you reprocess the Period or an affected statement. Your goal is to get the total lines in these two documents down to zero.

7. Download the All Sales CSV, via Excel you can use pivot tables to perform some final checks on your sales data. Below are some examples of checks you could perform. If your All Sales CSV includes more sales lines than your Excel can handle, you can create more streamlined custom CSVs via the Reports page.

• Does the combination of Channel & Configuration always make sense? Are there any physical product Configurations linked to the Channel “Digital” for example?
• Are the monetary values plausible? Are there streams with a per-unit value of more than 10 cents which would suggest they are more likely a download?
• Is the data as detailed as can be? Are there any sales linked to a Configuration “All” or Territory “World” that could be more specific?
• Is the spelling of the Sources & Sub Sources consistent? Are some sales mapped to the source Itunes while others are mapped to iTunes?
• Are any sales mapped to Channels & Configurations that no longer exist in the settings?

8. If you found any mistakes in your statements that require you to make changes to your sales, catalogue or contracts; reprocess the Period for your changes to feed through to the statements. Either reprocess the Period as a whole or just the statements that were affected. Beware, your Period’s zip file containing all individual statements will not be updated when reprocessing statements individually; these will only update when you reprocess the Period as a whole.

9. Make sure all Payees have a User attached, so your artists will be able to access their statements. Pay special attention to the Payees you’ve added since your last royalty period. When creating new Users, make sure you have a Custom Email Text set in your Communication Settings. Consider sending a personal email to your new users first, to inform them an invite email from your royalty accounting platform will land in their inbox soon.

10. Publish your artist statements. This will make the statements visible to every User who has access to a Payee.

11. Send your artist statements. This button sends an email to every User informing that their new statement is ready.

12. Lock the Period. This will make you unable to make any more changes. If necessary you can at any time unlock the Period again.

13. Archive fully reported sales statements & costs that were included in this Period. This will keep your sales page tidy & only display statements that still need to be reported. You can Archive all included sales files in bulk via the Included Sales tab of your Period.

14. When you make a payment to an artist, you need to make sure this payment is reflected on the artist’s balance. To do so, a negative Transaction needs to be created on the Contract. You can either create create payments via the interface on the Transactions tab of your Contracts or in bulk via the Transactions excel template. For Contracts with Auto Payments enabled, a payment will automatically be added where the Closing Balance hits the minimum payout. An export of all the Contracts closing balances, and a list of all the Auto Payments created by Curve this Period, can be found via the Export button in the Statement tab of the Period.