Payee Summaries vs. Statements
We break down royalty accounting periods for payees in two ways: Summaries and Statements.
Summaries
The always-up-to-date breakdown of a payee's account during a period - the "live" statement. Payee Summaries are available to view and audit by the admin as soon as a period is created via the Period Dashboard. Changing something that occurred during or prior to the period will automatically update the Payee Summary along with any subsequent summaries.
Like transactions, summaries are unpublished by default- when you're ready to publish and payout, generate a statement.
Statements
Statements are the never-changing, carbon copy of a summary as it appears when you're ready to publish and payout.
The statement acts as the reference for the payout. If anything changes in a payee's account for the period after the fact, the affected payee summaries will automatically update, but the statement will stay the same, so there is never a question as to how a payout was determined. In order to make changes to a statement, simply make the corresponding updates in the system (i.e. updates to transactions, contracts, etc) and generate a new statement - and our system will give you the option to archive the old one for reference or delete it altogether when doing so.
Statements are published by default, and the transactions the statement references are published simultaneously.
Note! You can generate statements without notifying payees, but you can't generate statements without publishing the statement or the transactions.
If a payee's balance has changed after a statement has been generated, simply compare that Period's published Statement (i.e. the reported balances) to the corresponding Payee Summary for that Period (i.e. the current, up to date live balance) in order to determine changes in balance and transaction detail.
How to read a Payee Summary & Statement
For more detail on how to read Payee Summaries and Statements within IC, please see our helpful documentation here.