Ledgers
Ledgers allow you to maintain multiple balances per payee. You may need multiple balances if you’re obligated to pay out on one contract regardless of the recoupment status of another. These arrangements are sometimes referred to as uncrossed contracts. Every split on a contract can be assigned to a ledger, and those ledgers will be used to group balances in payee summaries and statements.
By default, splits on contracts have no ledger, which corresponds to a payee having crossed contracts, and are grouped together in their “Primary Ledger”. The total payable for a payee is calculated by summing all positive ledger balances. Let’s walk through an example.
You collect both master-side and publishing income for an artist, and have separate agreements for each. The artist’s release is still in the red on the master side to the tune of -$1,000.00 due to an advance, but you’ve received $750.00 worth of income due to your artist on the publishing side.
Without ledgers, the payee’s primary ledger balance would be -$250.00, making their total payable $0.00. If you created a “Publishing” ledger and assigned it to the relevant splits, the Primary Ledger’s balance would be -$1,000.00, the Publishing ledger balance would be $750.00, and the payee’s total payable would be $750.00.
We recommend that you re-use the same ledger across multiple payees. In the example above, your Publishing ledger could be used for any payees that have an uncrossed publishing agreement. This allows you to effectively use ledgers when filtering or analyzing your transactions outside of the context of a single payee.
Creating a Ledger
Ledgers can be created from the Ledgers page (Catalog -> Ledgers) in your account. To create a ledger, navigate to this page and and click the blue "Create" button.
Ledgers can also be created during Contract Creation in the Catalog Manager or Contracts page of your account. To create a Ledger during Contract creation, press the + next to the Ledger drop-down box.
To apply a Ledger you've created to a contract, simply start typing the name of the Ledger into the drop-down box and select the proper Ledger. This will uncross the contract balance and add this contract to the Ledger group you've selected.