Most royalty statement "templates" are blank grids you retype your earnings into. This page documents a better kind: a normalized earnings-tape format that a free tool fills in from your actual statements — every column defined, every number traceable to a source file, every statement checked against its own totals.
The whole format rests on one rule: one row per transaction line, exactly as the source reported it, with provenance. Nothing is aggregated at this layer, nothing is invented, and nothing is dropped — source columns that do not map to the schema are preserved alongside the row rather than discarded. Every field in the normalized line schema:
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| source | Which pipe the money came through — DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, Symphonic, ASCAP, the MLC, a publisher export — plus the file the row was extracted from. |
| period | The usage period (sale month, usage window or performance quarter), kept distinct from the date the source reported it. |
| artist / title | Display artist and track or work title, as printed on the statement. |
| isrc / upc | Recording and product identifiers, where the source provides them — the join keys across distributor statements. |
| work_id | The song-side identifier (society work ID, ISWC or song code) on publishing and society statements. |
| income_type | What right was paid: recording revenue, performance, mechanical, neighbouring rights, sync and so on. |
| dsp | The store, service or licensee — Spotify, Apple Music, "YouTube (Ads)", SiriusXM, a broadcaster. |
| territory | Country of sale or performance, normalized to one coding scheme. |
| units | Streams, downloads or plays; fractional and negative values preserved as reported. |
| gross / fees / net | The three money facts kept separate, so a net-only source and a gross-minus-commission source can live in one table without ambiguity about which number is payable. |
| currency | The currency of the amounts on this row, so multi-currency statements cannot silently mix into one sum. |
Because every source lands in this one grain, questions that span pipes — what did this ISRC earn everywhere last year? which service pays my catalog best? — become a filter and a pivot, not a re-keying project. The field-by-field mapping from each vendor's own layout is documented on the converter's format pages, listed below.
The Excel deliverable wraps that line table in five reporting sheets:
There is nothing to type. Drop your statements — CSVs, TSVs, zips, any mix of sources and periods — into the free converter. The engine detects each format, normalizes every line, ties each statement out against its printed totals, and builds this workbook from your data. Parsing runs entirely in your browser: your statements are never uploaded, and results are free to view on screen. Downloads use a free monthly allowance of 120 pages, where a page is 500 normalized rows — enough for a typical indie catalog's quarterly statements.
There is a small industry of paid royalty spreadsheet products, typically priced between $79 and $349, that sell you an empty workbook and instructions for copying your statements into it by hand. The layouts are often sensible — but hand-keying is precisely where royalty accounting goes wrong: transposed digits, deleted negative rows, mixed currencies, missed periods, and no way to prove the totals match the source files. Our position is simply that a template should be generated from the statements and verified against them, not filled in by a person. The generated version is free; the verification is the point.
Column dictionaries for every format the converter reads natively:
Read next: how to read a royalty statement · preparing an earnings tape for catalog diligence · back to the converter.
Ready when you are: drop your statements and download this workbook, built from your own numbers — parsed in your browser, never uploaded.
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