Making Payments in Tone

Once royalty statements have been generated and your Tone wallet is funded, you are officially ready to issue royalty payouts to your partners, artists, and producers. This guide walks you through the step-by-step process of issuing payments, explains payee verification prerequisites, and defines every statement status you will encounter during an active or closed accounting cycle.

Learn more about funding your Tone wallet: How to Enable Payments in Tone

🥇 Best Practice: Payee Verification Timeline

To ensure a seamless payout experience, we highly recommend executing your payee onboarding workflow well before your reporting deadline:

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Tone Tip: Always invite payees to the Tone app prior to running your statements. This grants your artists and producers sufficient time to log in, securely submit their tax forms, and add their banking information. TIN (Taxpayer Identification Number) verification can take a few business days, so this allows enough time for payees to become Verified before you’re ready to process payments.

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🚀 Step-by-Step: Issuing Royalty Payouts

Follow these steps to pay statement balances within an active, published royalty period:

  1. Select the Royalty Period

    1. From the top navigation menu, head to Royalties and click into your current published period. Please note that you cannot issue payments for an unpublished period.

  2. Select Statements to Fund

    1. Within the Statements table, look for the Pay? column.

      1. Toggle the Pay all switch in the upper right corner if you wish to fund the balance due for all Verified payees.
      2. Toggle individual statements if you wish to only pay out specific balances.

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      The interactive Pay? toggle switch will only appear for payees who are fully Verified. If a payee is unverified, the toggle will remain hidden until their banking and tax information has been added and verified by Tone.

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  3. Click Pay Out

    1. Click the purple Pay out [#] statements button located on the right side of the interface control pane. Payments will be issued immediately from your available Tone wallet balance.
    2. Funds should land in payee accounts within 1-3 business days.

  4. Automatic Reconciliation

    1. Any payments processed through Tone are automatically logged and tracked in your next accounting cycle for hassle-free bookkeeping.

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Tone Tip: You do not have to issue all your payments at once! Payments can easily be handled in separate batches. As long as the current accounting period remains open, you can log back in and issue additional payment batches at any time. This is especially useful if any payees become Verified between reporting periods.

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🧠 Understanding Statement Statuses

Tone provides the Statement Status for each contract's balance in a calculated royalty period. Navigate to the Statements section and view the Statement Status column. Use this breakdown to understand exactly what each tag represents:

Statement Status What It Means Action Required?
Unrecouped The contract's cumulative expenses or advances exceed its current sales revenue. No balance is currently due. No
Transferred to summary This is a sub-contract that is crossed to a summary contract. The balance of this contract has been transferred to the summary contract statement. Fund the corresponding summary contract balance (if payable)
Not payable The payee cannot receive funds, typically because their banking/tax information has not been Verified with Tone. Verified payees will display a prominent green checkmark next to their name. Unverified payees must log into Tone and complete their account setup.
No activity There was zero sales, cost, or transaction activity recorded against this contract during this specific accounting window. No
Does not meet minimum payout amount The payable balance is lower than the minimum payout threshold ($10). Balance is automatically carried forward. No

🔒 Closed Period Statuses

Once you finalize your cycle and click Close period, the Pay? column transforms from interactive switches into a permanent ledger record. Here is what those permanent historical statuses mean: