Automatic Financial Reports

Since May 1st, 2021 Believe has started generating automatic financial reports for all clients and visitors with a Distribution contract. These reports contain details on your revenue and are here to provide you with maximum transparency.

This article details:

1. Where to find and how to open these reports
2. What is contained in these reports
3. How to use these reports to get the maximum benefits out of them

1. Finding and opening the automatic reports

Where are these automatic reports?

The automatic reports are available directly on the Backstage, in the Financial Reports section:

They are registered under a specific tab called "Automatic reports"

What is the format of these reports? How to open them?

The report itself will be a CSV file, but it will be integrated into a ZIP file. How do you open a ZIP file?

If you're using a Mac:

1. Locate the Zip archive file in the Finder of the Mac
2. Double-click the .zip archive file to begin extracting the zip archive
3. When finished, the unzipped contents will appear in the same folder as the original .zip archive

If you're using a PC:

1. Locate the ZIP folder (if necessary, use the file explorer)

2. To unzip the entire folder, right-click to select Extract All, and then follow the instructions.

3. To unzip a single file or folder, double-click the zipped folder to open it. Then, drag or copy the item from the zipped folder to a new location.

2. Content of the reports

What part of the catalogue and revenue is covered by these reports?

These reports are Full Catalog Single Reports, which means they cover the whole catalogue of the account for which it has been generated.

All revenue for a period is included in the Full Catalog Single Report of the said period.

What period is covered by these reports?

Your pre-generated report depends on your payment frequency:

• If you are paid monthly, you will get a monthly report.
• If you are paid quarterly, you will get one report per month and one report covering the whole quarter.

What information do these reports contain?

To ensure all customers have the complete details of their revenue, pre-generated financial reports are standardized: they always contain the same columns, in the same order.

List of columns included in the standard financial reports:

• Reporting Month
• Sales Month
• Platform
• Country
• Label name
• Artist name
• Release title
• UPC
• Release catalogue number
• Track Title
• ISRC
• Release type
• Sale type
• Streaming Subscription type
• Quantity
• Client Payment Currency
• Unit price
• Mechanical Fee
• Gross revenue
• Client share rate
• Net Revenue

3. Using these reports

What can these reports be used for?

You are a music producer or an artist:

• Easily ingest your revenue data and monitor your distribution revenue
• Perform a full analysis of your catalogue performance, revenue structure (who listens or watches your content, where and on which platform), revenue breakdown
• Calculate what you owe to your artists, labels and partners easily
• Prepare statements and payments to your partners
• Get all the details necessary to build your declarations and statements to various institutions and your own partners

You are a label's or distributor's accountant:

• Get all details on revenue to manage accounting accurately
• Prepare statements and declarations

How to prepare statements in just a few clicks?

Here is a very useful trick to preparing statements for each of your artists, labels, releases or even tracks.

1. Create a PivotTable based on the whole report
2. Set up the PivotTable so it looks like the table you want to give your artists or labels as a statement. This will be the template for all the statements so it is a crucial step.
3. Drag-drop the value "Artist Name" or "Label Name" in the Filters section
4. Click on the arrow below PivotTable, then Options and then Show Report Filter Pages
   
5. In the pop-up window, select the Artist Name or Label Name you just drag-dropped and click on OK
6. It automatically creates a PivotTable with the same template for each of your Artists or Labels, in a specific tab.
7. Add whatever you like in each statement, if needed. If not, your statements are ready!

If you want more great tips with PivotTable on Excel, check out this video!

Your report exceeds Excel limits, what can you do?

This video gives you a great solution:

See also the articles :

• Merging financial reports
• Create financial reports

For more information on how to import .csv files into Excel, you may consult the Microsoft support page.

• Import data from a CSV, HTML, or text file
• Import or export text (.txt or .csv) files