Now that you have set up your payees and contracts, entered your catalogue and uploaded income files, you are ready to run a period and produce some statements! Please watch our introduction on how to create a Period below. We provide notes and further reading below the video.

You will be taken to a setup page with two tabs. The first is the Setup tab where you can enter top line info about the period and the second, Included Income, where you select which Income reports to include.

Creating a Period – Summary

To get started, go to the Period page under your Statements directory and hit the +Create button on the top right of your page to create a new Period.

1. Name your Period – This Period name will display on your statements and on the Transactions tab of your Contracts. Please make sure your Period name is descriptive, clean and consistent with your previous Periods.

2. Select the Accounting Period Type – Curve will only create a statement for the Contracts that have a matching Accounting Period Type. A Monthly Contract will not be included in your Half-Yearly run, for example.

3. Specify the Year & Accounting Period – Which year and semester/quarter/month are these royalties for? These abbreviations will be displayed across the statements and artist portal.

4. Choose a Start & End Date for your Period – The Start Date picks up the Opening Balance from the transaction tab on the contracts and the End Date posts the closing balance. Only transactions (such as payments and advances) that fall within this timezone will be part of the Statement Of Account.

5. Choose an Accounting Date – This date will be displayed on the Self-Billing invoices and ideally matches the day you intend to publish your statements.

6. If you have Contracts in multiple currencies, provide Exchange Rates – If you have Contracts in a currency different to your Home Currency, you will need to provide a currency exchange rate from your Home Currency to this alternative currency. If all Contracts are set in your Home Currency, then you are not required to provide any Exchange Rates.

7. Include all the Income Files for which you want to account a royalty – Via the Included Income tab of your Period setup, you will be presented with the Income files that you can include in this run. When you first land on the page, the Included Income section will be empty and all your uploaded Income file will automatically be listed in the Excluded Income section. The goal is to move over all Income files you wish to include in this period to the Included Income section.

A simple way to select your desired Income files is by filtering on the Target Period. For this reason, it is best practice to always complete your Target Period field and do so in a consistent manner when uploading Income or costs. Once you are happy all your required Income statements are displaying in the Included Income for this period, hit the Calculate button at the foot of the page.

Your period will now begin calculating. Clicking back into it will show you its progress, but it is not necessary to keep your browser open for this calculation to complete. Once it has finished calculating, there are a few steps to go through to finalize our calculations and statements.

8. Review the Unreported Income CSV – Any Income that is not successfully reported will be flagged with you in the Unreported CSV. These files can be downloaded via the Download button on the top right of your Period.

Income can be unreported for four possible reasons. (1) There is no Contract attached to the Work, (2) the contract is inactive, (3) the contract does not have a matching Income term, (4) there was no calculation input, such as a missing Gross Amount. More info

Once you have resolved the underlying cause of the unreported income, you will need to reprocess the Period or individual Statement for these Income flush through to the statement. The Unreported CSV file is updated in this process. Your goal is to get the total lines in this CSV down to zero.

9. Review your Statement Output – It is best practice to review your output, to make sure any oversights in your setup are ruled out. You can run Reports to analyse your Included Income data; for example to check all royalty lines have a Sale and Transaction Date or have a Source and Sub Source with consistent spelling.

10. Archive your Income files – Archiving your included Income will hide these from your Income page. This will keep your Income page tidy, and will make it clear to you that these Income no longer need to be included in an upcoming royalty Period. You can Archive all included Income in bulk via your Period.

12. Lock your Period – Once you have reviewed your statements and are happy with your output, you can Lock the Period. This marks the Period as done and will make it impossible for you or anyone else to reprocess the Period or individual statements, or to reingest any included income files. Though, if necessary, you can at any time unlock the Period again and make further changes if that would be required.

13. Ask for a Curve Healthcheck (for new clients) – If this is the first time you are creating a Period and Statements, please ask support@curveroyaltysystems.com to perform a health-check on your output. We always perform a health-check on our clients’ their setup prior to them sending out their first statements. Then, we will provide feedback on your data and setup, which allows you to make some final changes prior to sending out your statements, ensuring the statements you send to your clients are as accurate and complete as possible.

Your Period is now done! In our next and final chapter, we will show you how to give your songwriters access to their Curve portal and how to deliver your statements.