How to combine royalty statements from three distributors into one report

Plenty of catalogs are spread across distributors. A label uses one for its own releases and inherits another with an acquired catalog. An artist has old releases on a self-serve distributor and new ones through a deal. A manager has three clients on three services. In every case, each distributor's dashboard shows a complete-looking picture of the slice it handles, and none of them can show the rest.

Combining the statements yourself is possible, and everyone who has tried knows where it goes wrong. This is a guide to doing it properly, and to what a combined report should contain.

Five things that have to be normalised

Money. Every distributor reports to at least three decimal places, and most rows are sub-cent. Sum the raw values in the smallest unit you can and round once at the end. Never round per row. And be sure you are summing the right column — a net figure in your account currency, not a gross or a sale-currency figure.

Periods. One file says "Sale Month", another "Statement Period", another "Reporting Date". Sale month and reporting date can be two months apart for the same money. Pick the column that means "when the stream happened", reduce it to a year and month, and use that for everything.

Stores. "Spotify", "Spotify USA", "Spotify - Premium" are one store. Map every spelling to one name before you break down by store, or every distributor's spelling becomes its own row.

Territories. One distributor writes "NZ", another "New Zealand". Map names to ISO codes.

Units. Some distributors label streams the platform refused to pay for — fraudulent, unqualified — and report them with units and no money. Those must come out of the unit total and stay in the file.

The two checks that matter more than the totals

Once the rows are normalised, before you read a single total, look at coverage.

Overlap. List the months each distributor reports. Where two distributors report the same month, some of that money may be the same streams counted twice — or may be a legitimate tail and ramp during a switch. Flag it. Do not resolve it automatically in either direction.

Gaps. Where a month between the first and the last is reported by nobody, a statement is missing. It is almost never a month with no earnings.

A combined report that puts the totals first and the caveats after has it backwards. The caveats change what the totals mean.

What the combined report should contain

This is the shape of the consolidated reports rights organisations issue, and it is the right shape:

• Summary — total net; total gross where reported; paid units; units reported and not paid; trailing twelve reported months; best single month; distinct recordings, territories and stores; months reported; top recording, store and territory; the share of earnings from your home territory.
• One sheet per breakdown — by store, by territory, by recording, by period, by source statement.
• Transaction detail — every row from every statement, with a Source Statement column saying which distributor it came from.
• Notes and methodology — the overlaps, the gaps, the currency, how stores and territories were mapped, and what was excluded from units and why.

And one rule: every figure on the summary is a formula over the detail sheet, not a pasted number. A pasted number has to be trusted. A SUMIFS over the rows beneath it can be checked, and it stays right when somebody deletes the row that should not have been there.

What not to do

Do not compute a per-stream rate. Units mix streams, downloads and video views by store, so money divided by units is a number that looks like a rate and is not one.

Do not pool the combined data into a benchmark against other catalogs. The value of a consolidated report is that it is one catalog's own truth.

The short way

SNVRKOTICS's statement reader does the five normalisations on import, detects the distributor from the file's headers, runs the overlap and gap checks, and shows the breakdowns across every distributor at once. The combined report above is one click: a workbook with the Summary, the breakdown sheets, the Transaction Detail with its Source Statement column, and the methodology, every figure a live formula.