In this guide, we will walk you through the entire platform in the order that will make the most sense for you to onboard your data and create your statements.
The Onboarding Process
To onboard your business & create your first statements, there are eight steps you will need to walk through. Every step in the process builds onto the next one, so it’s important to following this order so you don’t waste your time putting the cart before the horse!
- Customise your Client’s Settings – Here you configure your client & specify the building blocks for your data.
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Create a Payee for every artist – Each Payee represents a statement beneficiary. By creating a Payee, you essentially create an artist portal.
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Create a Contract for every artist – Here you define your artist deals and their terms. Each artist will need their own Contract, and each Contract will be mapped to a Payee.
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Add your Catalogue – On the Master module, this is where you build your Releases and Tracks. On the Publishing module, this is where you build your Works, Composers & Publishers. Each catalogue item is associated with one or many contracts, so you will need your Contracts in place in order to complete this step.
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Import your Sales data – When dropping your statements onto our sales page, Curve will instantly recognise, import & map down your sales data. Our Templates handle hundreds of different statement formats from an equal amount of sources. Furthermore, you can independently create your own Templates to match your own custom statement formats or adjust our existing Templates to fully match your data’s needs.
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Create your Costs – Add your costs, using the user interface or via Excel upload.
- Run your Period & Create Statements – After all of your sales and costs are ready, you can now pull it all together as part of a Period & create your Statements.
- Give artists access to their portal – When creating Users, you artists will instantly receive an invitation to the Curve platform & gain access to their royalty statements.
Onboarding Metadata Via Excel
In step 2 to 4; adding your Payees, Contracts and Catalogue via Curve’s user interface is one way of doing so. But more efficiently for large datasets, you can import data using the available Excel templates. For the best user experience, we advise using Microsoft Excel rather than alternatives.
At the top right of every Payee, Contract and Catalogue page in Curve you will see an Import & Export button. Using the Import button will allow you to upload large sets of data at once using our Excel templates. Using the Export button will again export this data in our Excel format, ready for you to make changes to and reimport. The green ‘Download Templates’ button will provide you with a zip of the latest versions of all of the excel templates.
There is a different template depending on which page of Curve you are looking to set up. To import metadata in bulk, the concept is simple and the same for each import template. Simply fill in the columns as specified in the column headers, save your file, and upload it to Curve using the Import button at the top right of your screen. The system will import the file in the background & send you a notification once complete.
If an Excel template looks daunting at first, try building a complex example using the web interface. Then export these examples to Excel, so that you can replicate the structure for other similar examples for your business. Curve uses exactly the same excel structures to both export & import data.
For more information on how to use our Excel templates, please visit this chapter in our documentation.
Follow Our Demo
To follow along with us throughout our Getting Started Guide, we have pre-populated the main excel templates with fictional data that you can trial with through this tutorial or use as a reference to onboard your own data. To follow along with us, please download the Curve Demo Files below. There are two folders, both contain the necessary data to work through examples in this Guide on either the Master or Publishing side.
Download the Curve_Demo_Files here
Now, let’s get started. Please follow us to step 1 of using Curve: configuring your Settings.