The Statement Engine: Generating & Paying Royalties

The Statement Engine is Imprint Core’s primary use case. If you have been juggling spreadsheets for years, this is the single component that will save you the most time and effort. Fortunately, it is extremely simple to use.

Setting Your Statement Scope

The Goal: Define exactly which sales, dates, and authors to include in your statement run.

When you open the Statement Engine, you will notice the filters from the Dashboard reappear. Most fields are disabled to keep things simple, leaving you with three crucial controls to define your statements:

• From and To Dates: Because most royalty source files don’t have exact daily transaction dates, Imprint defaults import values to the last day of a given month.

  • To run a multi-month statement: Set the range (e.g., 30/04/2024 to 31/05/2024 covers both April and May).

  • To run a single month: The From and To dates must be exactly the same (e.g., 31/05/2024 to 31/05/2024).

• Vendors Filter: Use this if you need to generate a statement for a single vendor (e.g., if ACX was late or you had to fix a specific KDP file). Otherwise, leave it blank to include all vendors.

• Authors Filter: Generally, you will leave this blank to run statements for your entire roster at once. However, if a specific author requests a revised statement, you can filter for just their name here.

Pro-Tip: Visualize It First If you are unsure exactly what data will be pulled into the statements, drop your chosen date range into the main Dashboard first to get a visual representation of the sales data.

Generating the Statements

The Goal: Calculate the math and generate the physical PDF files.

Once your dates and filters are set, simply click the Generate Statements button.

The statements for your selected period are instantly created, and the payable amounts—automatically converted into the author's selected base currency—are shown in the table.

• All generated PDFs are securely saved directly to the /statements subfolder within your Imprint home directory on your computer.

• All newly produced statements default to an Unpaid status.
  

 Reviewing Your PDFs

The Goal: Verify the statements look professional before sending them out.

Highlight any statement in the list and click View Selected PDF in the bottom right corner. This will open the statement in your computer's default PDF reader.

Note: You can fully customize how these look! Head over to the Settings Page to upload your publishing company logo, adjust header alignment, and choose whether to generate Highly Detailed or Summary-level statements.

Distribution and Payment

The Goal: Send the statements to your authors and actually pay them.

Imprint Core eliminates the manual copy-pasting of emails and bank transfers with two powerful distribution tools:

• One-Click Emailing: If you have configured your SMTP server in the Settings page and added email addresses to your Author Roster, simply highlight all the statements in the list and click Email Selected Statements. Imprint will automatically email the PDFs directly to your authors.

• PayPal Mass Pay Export: Select the statements you wish to pay and click Export PayPal Mass Pay CSV. This instantly produces a formatted CSV file that you can upload directly into PayPal to pay everyone at once.

Important Note on PayPal Mass Pay: Mass Payouts are not enabled on standard PayPal business accounts by default. You may need to contact PayPal Support and request they turn this feature on for your account. Alternatively, you can always just read the generated CSV and copy/paste the amounts into the standard PayPal GUI.

The Final Step: Marking as Paid

The Goal: Lock the financial period and update your tax records.

The final step in the Statement Engine workflow is to highlight your statements and mark them as Paid.

🚨 WARNING: The Data Lock

Once a statement is marked as paid, you will no longer be able to roll back, edit, or delete the financial records covered by those payments. This protects the integrity of your accounting. Once marked as paid, these royalty payouts will automatically populate on your Annual / Tax Summary tab for easy end-of-year accounting.