Catalog prices are quoted as a multiple of earnings — but only of earnings the buyer can verify. The earnings tape is the document their analysts actually open, and the state of your royalty data decides whether diligence takes weeks or quarters, and whether the price holds.
The request list varies by buyer, but the core of it is remarkably consistent:
Most sellers arrive with the shoebox: years of PDFs, portal downloads and CSVs in a dozen layouts, some periods missing, some sources never collected. The buyer's analysts then face a choice — re-key it all into their own model, or discount for uncertainty. In practice they do both. Every unexplained dip becomes a question; every question becomes a diligence call and another week; every number that cannot be traced to a statement gets a haircut. Sellers pay for messy data twice: in time, and in price.
A clean tape reverses the dynamic. When the buyer's analysts can filter to any asset, any period, any source — and reconcile any figure back to the statement it came from — the conversation moves from "can we trust these numbers?" to "what is the catalog worth?". That is a materially better negotiation to be in, and it starts long before a buyer appears: collecting statements and closing period gaps is far easier while the accounts are still active than in the middle of a deal.
For the machine-readable part of the shoebox, the free converter does the heavy lifting: it detects each format, normalizes every line into one documented schema with provenance, ties each statement out against its own printed totals to the cent, and produces an Excel earnings tape with by-period and by-source views — the raw material of a diligence-grade dataset. It runs entirely in your browser: statements are parsed locally and never uploaded, so you can take a first pass over a catalog's data before any NDA is signed, on either side of the table.
Formats covered natively, with column dictionaries on each page:
Label PDFs and scanned statements. Royalty statements from labels and older administrators arrive as designed PDF documents — sometimes scans. Extracting those reliably needs supervised extraction with human quality control, not a browser tool.
Foreign-society files. Collection societies abroad each have their own layouts, languages and currencies; several formats are only obtainable from inside a live account.
Statement gaps that need chasing. A complete tape often requires requesting missing periods from distributors, societies and administrators — portal logins, support tickets and follow-up, not parsing.
That is custom-work territory, and it is exactly the work we do: assembling a complete, tied-out earnings tape and data room for a catalog sale, under NDA, with a tie-out report on every statement — the messy PDFs, the foreign files and the chasing included.
Tell us what the data room looks like today and what the timeline is. We will tell you plainly what the free tool can do for you and what needs the custom service.
Read next: how to read a royalty statement · the normalized earnings-tape format · back to the converter.