This article is part of our Complete Guide to Royalty Management.
If you distribute books in New Zealand through Bateman Books, you already have one more sales file to manage each period. Bateman is a well-established distributor focused on the New Zealand market, and for publishers with NZ-specific titles — local interest, educational content, or regional non-fiction — they are often the primary route to bookshops and retailers across the country. The challenge is that processing Bateman sales reports alongside your international distributors adds another currency, another payment timeline, and another file format to your royalty workflow.
The good news is that Royalties HQ now natively supports Bateman Books sales files. You can upload them directly without reformatting, and the system handles the rest.
Where to find your Bateman sales reports
Bateman provides sales reports through your account with them. Log in to your Bateman Books account and navigate to the reporting section to download your sales data for the relevant period. These reports contain your unit sales, returns, and earnings from the New Zealand market.
Save the file to a dedicated folder alongside your other distributor reports. If you are managing files from multiple distributors each period, having a consistent folder structure makes a real difference. Our guide to organising distributor sales files walks through a system that scales as you add more sources.
Understanding Bateman’s reporting
Bateman’s sales data is focused on the New Zealand market, and all figures are reported in New Zealand Dollars (NZD). This is straightforward if New Zealand is your only territory, but most publishers are also pulling in sales from Amazon in USD, Ingram in multiple currencies, and possibly UK or European distributors in GBP and EUR.
That means your royalty calculations need to account for NZD alongside everything else. We cover the mechanics of this in detail in our post on multi-currency royalties — the short version is that good royalty software preserves the original currency from each distributor and handles conversion at the point of calculation, so you are never manually looking up exchange rates.
Payment timeline
Bateman pays publishers on a periodic basis, typically aligned with their reporting cycle. The exact timing depends on your agreement with Bateman, but you should expect a delay between the sales period and when the corresponding payment arrives in your account.
This is the same pattern you see with other distributors — Ingram pays on roughly a 90-day delay, Amazon KDP on about 60 days. When you record publisher income payments in Royalties HQ, each payment is linked to the corresponding sales batch, so you can track exactly which sales period each deposit covers, regardless of when it actually lands.
Preparing your file for import
The most important rule: do not edit your Bateman sales file. Download it and leave it untouched. Opening the file in Excel and re-saving it — even without making visible changes — can alter the formatting enough to prevent a clean import. You can rename the file without opening it to include the sales period, which is helpful for keeping your records organized, but do not modify the contents.
If you need to review the data before uploading, open a copy rather than the file you plan to import.
Step-by-step: uploading your Bateman sales file
The import process in Royalties HQ takes about a minute:
- Go to the main menu and click Add New Sales
- Drop your Bateman sales file into the upload zone (or click to browse)
- Royalties HQ automatically detects the file as a Bateman report. Confirm the format is correct and click Continue
- The system validates the file. If everything checks out, the status shows “Ready to import”
- Click Import to bring in the data
- Each row becomes a sales line, grouped into one or more sales batches
After importing, you will need to add a publisher income payment for each sales batch to link the sales data to the actual money you received from Bateman. This is what drives your royalty calculations downstream.
Native format support
Royalties HQ supports 12 native sales file formats from major distributors, and Bateman Books is one of the newest additions to that list. Native support means the system reads the raw file exactly as Bateman provides it — no column mapping, no reformatting, no stripping out headers. Every imported row is preserved as an individual sales line with a full audit trail.
This is especially valuable for smaller-market distributors like Bateman, where the volume of transactions might be lower but the data still needs to flow cleanly into your royalty calculations alongside your higher-volume channels.
NZD currency handling
Because Bateman reports in NZD, all sales lines from your import will carry the New Zealand Dollar as their currency. Royalties HQ preserves this throughout the system — your Bateman sales stay in NZD, your Amazon US sales stay in USD, your Ingram UK sales stay in GBP.
When you run royalties, the system applies the appropriate exchange rates so that authors receive accurate statements regardless of how many currencies are in play. If you are dealing with three or four currencies across different distributors, this automatic handling eliminates one of the most error-prone parts of manual royalty processing. For a deeper dive, see managing multi-currency royalties.
How Bateman fits into a multi-distributor workflow
Many NZ-focused titles also sell through broader channels. A book distributed by Bateman in New Zealand might simultaneously be available through Ingram for international orders or listed on Amazon for direct-to-consumer sales. That means the same title can appear in sales files from multiple distributors in any given period.
Royalties HQ handles this naturally. Each distributor’s sales data is imported separately and tracked independently, but royalty calculations pull from all sources when computing what you owe each rights holder. You get a single, consolidated view without having to manually merge data from different files and currencies.
If you are still building out your import routine across multiple distributors, our post on organising distributor sales files is a good starting point for setting up a system that does not fall apart as your catalog grows.
Tips and next steps
Import consistently. Make Bateman part of your regular import cycle alongside your other distributors. The more consistent your routine, the less likely you are to miss a period or double-import a file.
Keep originals. Store the raw files from Bateman in a folder organized by period. If you ever need to re-import or verify data, unmodified originals save time.
Link payments promptly. Once Bateman’s payment arrives, record the publisher income payment and link it to the relevant sales batch. This keeps your reconciliation clean and ensures royalty runs reflect actual cash received.
For a full walkthrough of the import process and all supported formats, see the importing sales data documentation. For Bateman-specific details and field mappings, check the Bateman documentation. And if you are evaluating whether your current royalty workflow is keeping up, download our free guide for a closer look at what a modern setup looks like.