This article is part of our Complete Guide to Royalty Management.
If you publish through Ingram, you know the drill. Every month, a sales compensation email lands in your inbox with an attached spreadsheet. You download it, open it, and try to figure out what you owe each author. Then you do it again for the next file. And the next one. Before long, you have a folder full of identically named XLS files and no clear system for turning them into royalty statements.
The good news is that Royalties HQ natively supports IngramSpark and Lightning Source sales files, so you can upload them directly without reformatting a single cell. This guide walks you through the entire process, from finding your reports to getting them into the system.
Where to find your IngramSpark sales compensation reports
Ingram emails you monthly sales compensation reports as spreadsheet attachments. These arrive automatically and contain your sales and earnings data for the period. For most publishers, these emailed files are the easiest starting point.
You can also download reports manually from the IngramSpark dashboard. Log in at myaccount.ingramspark.com, then go to Reports > Compensation > Compensation Statements. Select the year and month, and download the CSV for each report type. There are usually four report types per month, so make sure you grab them all. Bulk download is not available, so you will need to click each one individually.
One important detail: make sure you are using the main Reports section. Do not use the “Reporting - Classic” option. Those files use a different format and will not import correctly.
The IngramSpark vs. Lightning Source difference
This trips up a lot of publishers. IngramSpark and Lightning Source are both part of the Ingram family, but they have separate accounts, separate dashboards, and separate report formats. If you have titles on both platforms, you are dealing with two distinct sets of sales files each month.
Royalties HQ handles both natively. When you upload a file, the system automatically detects whether it is an IngramSpark file or a Lightning Source file and processes it accordingly. You do not need to select the format manually or convert anything. Just drop in the original file as-is.
The key rule for both: do not edit the contents of your sales files. Modifying the data, even something as minor as adjusting a column width and re-saving, can prevent the file from importing. You can rename the file without opening it, and in fact we recommend that you do.
Why renaming your files matters
Here is a quirk that catches people off guard. The sales compensation files that Ingram emails you do not include the sales month in the filename. Every file arrives with the same generic name. After a few months of downloads, your folder looks like a wall of identical filenames with no way to tell January from June.
Before you upload to Royalties HQ, rename each file to include the month and year. Something like “IngramSpark-Sales-2026-01.xls” works well. This makes it far easier to identify your uploads inside the system and avoids confusion when you are reviewing historical data.
If you want to take this a step further, you can automate your Ingram sales reports so files are saved and renamed without any manual effort.
Understanding Ingram’s payment timeline
Ingram pays on approximately a 90-day delay from the end of the sales month. So if your books sell copies in January, you will not see that compensation until roughly April. This is standard for Ingram and applies to both IngramSpark and Lightning Source.
This delay matters when you are reconciling your royalty periods. The sales data in a January compensation report reflects January sales, but the money does not arrive for another three months. When you import your Amazon KDP sales alongside your Ingram data, you will notice that KDP pays on a shorter cycle. Keeping track of which distributor pays when, and matching payments to the correct sales period, is one of the trickiest parts of royalty management.
If you are still figuring out the best way to organize all of this, download our free guide for a walkthrough of the full royalty workflow.
Step-by-step: uploading your IngramSpark sales file
Once you have your sales file downloaded and renamed, the upload process in Royalties HQ takes about a minute:
- Go to the main menu and click Add New Sales
- Drop your sales file into the upload zone (or click to browse)
- Royalties HQ will automatically detect the file type. Confirm it shows the correct format and click Continue
- The system validates the file. If everything checks out, the status will show “Ready to import”
- Click Import to bring in the data
- Each row in the file 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. This links the sales data to the actual money you received from Ingram, which is what drives your royalty calculations.
How Royalties HQ handles this
Royalties HQ supports 10 native sales file formats from major distributors, and both IngramSpark and Lightning Source are on that list. The system reads the raw file exactly as the distributor provides it, so there is no need to reformat columns, map fields, or strip out header rows.
When you upload an Ingram file, the platform identifies the file type, validates the contents, and creates sales batches automatically. Every imported row is preserved as an individual sales line with a full audit trail. You can review, search, and report on your Ingram sales data alongside everything else in one place.
For a full walkthrough of the upload process and all supported formats, see our importing sales data documentation.
Setting up email automation for monthly imports
Since Ingram emails you sales reports every month on a predictable schedule, you can set up an email filter to automatically save those attachments to a dedicated folder in Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive. This eliminates the step of manually downloading and organizing files.
Configure your filter to match the sender and subject line of Ingram’s compensation emails, then route the attachment to a specific folder. If your email client supports it, set a rule to rename the file with the sales month so you do not end up with a pile of identically named spreadsheets.
This kind of lightweight automation saves a surprising amount of time over the course of a year, especially if you are managing both IngramSpark and Lightning Source accounts. The files land in your folder, already named and organized, ready to upload into Royalties HQ whenever you sit down to process royalties.