Executive summary
Once royalty claims have been calculated, the data still needs to be prepared, validated, and shared with multiple stakeholders — including Digital Service Providers (DSPs), finance systems, distribution teams, and partner societies.
For Stage, this process involved large volumes of royalty data, multiple reporting formats, and strict delivery requirements. Manual formatting and fragmented workflows created delays, increased operational overhead, and made it difficult to monitor reporting workflows and resolve issues efficiently.
Helmes helped Stage build an automated reporting and delivery platform that transforms royalty claim data into structured outputs for invoicing, distribution, reconciliation, and external reporting.
The system consolidates claim data, generates reports in multiple formats, and automatically distributes them through secure channels while providing users with monitoring and review tools.
As a result, finance and distribution teams gained reliable, ready-to-use data without additional manual processing, while external partners received cleaner and more consistent reporting. Internal teams also gained much better visibility into reporting status, audit trails, and operational workflows.
The platform reduced manual effort involved in organising and distributing royalty claims by more than 80%, helping Stage support faster invoicing and royalty distribution cycles at scale.
Meet the customer
Stage Enterprises is a London-based company on a mission to change the lives of music makers, labels, publishers and entire communities by fixing the broken royalty pipelines in the music industry.
In 2018, the company partnered with Helmes (under the Telesoftas brand) to build a music data platform that utilizes the latest technologies to exchange and process music data and provide fair pay to authors.
Together, we tackled the music industry’s biggest data challenges by building a robust data ingestion pipeline that handles an ever-growing range of data sources and scales seamlessly with usage growth.
The challenge
After music usage has been matched and claims have been generated, music societies and publishers still need to organise and deliver this data to multiple stakeholders, including Digital Service Providers (DSPs), finance teams, and internal royalty distribution systems.
The process often involved manual formatting, data transformation, and inconsistent delivery workflows, creating delays, errors, and limited visibility into reporting and distribution processes.
There was also no unified way for users to review and validate outputs or monitor automated delivery workflows efficiently.
The process
We worked closely with Stage’s teams to map out reporting requirements and delivery destinations, including reports for DSPs (e.g., CISAC Claim Confirmation & Invoice Details (CCID) files), internal finance workflows, and distribution systems.
We then created a unified data model and reporting layer that supports multiple export formats, with automation, validation, and user control built into the process.
Finally, we built dashboards and interfaces that allow users to monitor delivery workflows, review outputs, and intervene manually where necessary.
The whole development process included the following steps:
- Quick start: Interviewing client teams to capture reporting needs
- Mapping & modelling: Building a central data model to handle various export use cases
- Automation design: Creating modular delivery flows, including error handling and retries
- UI development: Adding tools for monitoring, user review, and control
- Deployment & training – Delivering, testing, and training staff for ongoing operations
The solution
The system performs multiple steps:
1. Data consolidation
The platform aggregates claim data across usage records, rights holders, and reporting periods, and combines it with the metadata required for reporting, such as DSP, usage channel, and country information.
2. Report generation & transformation
The platform generates multiple output formats tailored to different stakeholders and operational processes, including:
- CCID reports for DSPs following CISAC reporting standards
- Distribution files containing per-rights-holder allocation data
- Finance exports formatted for ERP, invoicing, and reconciliation systems
3. Automated delivery
Reports are automatically scheduled or triggered for delivery through secure channels such as SFTP, APIs, and cloud storage.
The system also supports delivery status tracking and retry mechanisms to help ensure reliable delivery across multiple destinations.
4. User enablement
Users have dashboards to review delivery statuses, processing statistics, and audit logs for system processes and user actions.
They can also review outputs, regenerate reports, pause deliveries, override values, and drill down into reports by DSP, usage type, or reporting period when manual intervention is required.
They can drill down reports by DSP, usage type, or time period as well as audit logs of every process and user action.
The results
End-to-end automation of claim delivery and reporting reduced manual effort involved in organising and delivering royalty claims by over 80%.
Finance teams now receive structured, timely data ready for billing without additional formatting work, while distribution teams can run automated payouts with minimal human intervention.
Users also gained much better visibility into reporting and delivery workflows. External partners receive clean, accurate, and timely usage and claim reports, while internal teams can track what was sent, when it was delivered, and to whom. As a result, the platform supports faster invoicing and royalty distribution cycles, helping rights holders receive payments more quickly.
- 47 music societies connected
- 927 distributions to sister societies
- 714,000 works distributed
Technologies
AWS services were used, including S3, Lambda, and EventBridge, to automate reporting workflows, orchestrate delivery processes, and securely distribute royalty data across multiple systems and stakeholders. Snowflake served as the central data platform for transforming royalty claims and metadata into export-ready datasets for finance, distribution, and DSP reporting workflows.
Our expertise
Royalty reporting and distribution workflows involve more than moving data between systems. Different stakeholders require different reporting formats, delivery rules, validation processes, and auditability standards, all while operating on strict distribution timelines.
To support this, Helmes helped Stage build a reporting and delivery platform that combines automation with operational visibility and control. The solution was designed not only to generate and distribute reports reliably, but also to help finance, royalty, and operational teams monitor workflows, validate outputs, and investigate issues when needed.
Our experience building large-scale data and reporting systems helped create a platform that can adapt to evolving reporting requirements, partner standards, and operational processes without adding unnecessary manual work.
Get in touch
