There’s a question that comes up in every royalty process setup, and it sounds deceptively simple: when do sales get reported to the artist or payee?
Is it when it was streamed? Or when you imported the sales reporting? When you invoiced a sales statement? Or when you got paid?
Well, the answer depends on the settings in your Royalty Account. Don’t worry: you may forget about this after it’s configured once, but you should understand how it works before your first statement goes out.
This is about Account Base: the setting that controls which date to use when assigning a sale to a royalty period. Get it right for your business model, and your statements will feel logical and predictable. Let’s walk through how it works.
Where to find it
When you create a new Royalty Account in details, the Account Base is one of the first things you configure on the Setup tab. You’ll see three options in the dropdown.
The three options
Sales Period — report the sale when it happened
This is the most common choice for record labels, and for good reason: it’s the most straightforward.
When you import a sales file, the sale is assigned to the month in which the sale actually occurred — regardless of when you received the statement, when you invoiced it, or when you got paid. A December stream goes into the Q4 or 2HJ statement, full stop.
This mirrors how the music business naturally talks about sales. When an artist asks “how did the release do in Q4?”, the answer should cover everything sold in Q4 — not what happened to get invoiced or paid in that quarter. Sales Period keeps it simple and transparent.
Invoice Date — report the sale when you invoice it
Invoice Date is a common choice for distributors and label service companies, because it separates when sales happened from when they flow through to royalty statements.
In practice: you import December sales in December (or in January, when you actually receive the file from the store), but the royalty date is determined by the invoice date you assign to that import. You could invoice in February and have those sales land in the Q1 statement — or later if your billing cycle calls for it.
This gives you meaningful flexibility to align royalty accounting with your own billing cycle and with the cadence your clients expect. Your import month and your royalty period don’t have to match.
One thing to keep in mind: if you bundle multiple months onto a single invoice, all of those months will land on that one invoice date. There’s no automatic spreading across periods. If you need different months in different royalty periods, they need to be on separate invoices.
Payment Period — report the sale when you get paid
Payment Period ties royalty accounting to actual cash received. A sale lands in the period in which the corresponding invoice was actually paid — not when the sale happened, not when you invoiced it.
This appeals to distributors who want their statements to reflect money that has genuinely arrived. If you’re passing revenue through to clients, it can make sense to account it only once it has landed in your bank account. If a payment runs late, the royalty date moves with it automatically.
The natural tradeoff is that sales reporting will always lag behind the actual sales period. That’s usually fine, as long as you communicate the model clearly to the artists and labels you work with.
A practical illustration
Say your distributor sends you a sales statement covering December. You receive and process it in January, and the payment arrives in March.
| Account Base | When does December land in royalties? |
|---|---|
| Sales Period | December / Q4 / 2HJ — as it happened |
| Invoice Date | The period of your invoice date — your choice |
| Payment Period | The period when payment is received — e.g. Q1 |
Same underlying sale. Three different royalty periods. None of them wrong — as long as the setting matches how your business actually works.
One thing you cannot change later
Once the first royalty statement has been processed for a Royalty Account, the Account Base is locked for that account. You cannot switch between Sales Period, Invoice Date, and Payment Period after the fact.
The reason is straightforward: changing the base mid-stream would risk accounting the same sales in two different periods, or missing them entirely. details prevents this to protect the integrity of your statements.
So: choose your Account Base before you run your first statement. If you’re migrating from another system or are unsure which option fits your setup, this is the moment to think it through — and to reach out if you need a second opinion.
Which one is right for you?
Most labels go with Sales Period — clean, transparent, easy to explain to artists.
Most distributors and label service companies lean towards Invoice Date or Payment Period, because they need flexibility between when sales occur and when they flow into client sales statements.
There’s no single correct answer. It depends on your business model, your client relationships, and how you process incoming revenue from stores and licensors.
If you’re not sure which fits your setup, the details team is happy to talk it through before you get started.
Get in touch with the details team →
This article is part of a series on royalty accounting in details.
Next: When Do Costs Get Accounted? Understanding Cost Royalty Dates