This article is part of our Complete Guide to Royalty Management.
If you still have titles on Lightning Source, you are probably all too familiar with the monthly routine — download the sales compensation file, figure out which month it belongs to, and start the tedious work of matching sales to authors. Lightning Source may be the older sibling in the Ingram family, but plenty of publishers still rely on it for a significant chunk of their catalogue. Getting those sales files into your royalty software cleanly is essential.
The good news is that Royalties HQ natively supports Lightning Source sales files, so you can upload them directly without reformatting, converting, or mapping any columns. This guide covers exactly where to find your reports, how to prepare them, and how to get them into the system in under a minute.
Where to find your Lightning Source sales reports
You have two options for getting your hands on your Lightning Source compensation data.
Option 1: Monthly email attachments (recommended)
Lightning Source sends you monthly sales compensation emails with spreadsheet attachments. These arrive automatically and contain your complete sales and earnings data for the period. For most publishers, the emailed files are the easiest and most reliable starting point — they show up in your inbox without you needing to remember to log in anywhere.
Option 2: Manual dashboard download
If you need to re-download a past report or missed an email, you can pull the files manually from your Lightning Source dashboard. Navigate to Reports > Compensation > Compensation Statements, select the year and month, and download each report. There are typically multiple report types per period, so make sure you grab all of them.
One critical detail: do not use the “Reporting — Classic” option. Those files use a completely different format and structure. They will not import correctly into Royalties HQ or most other royalty software. Stick with the standard Compensation Statements section.
Lightning Source vs. IngramSpark — separate systems, separate files
This is the single biggest point of confusion for publishers who use Ingram’s services. Lightning Source and IngramSpark are both part of Ingram, but they operate as separate accounts with 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 came from Lightning Source or IngramSpark and processes it with the correct parser. You do not need to select the format manually or do any conversion. Just drop in the original file.
If you also need to bring in your IngramSpark data, we have a dedicated walkthrough for that: how to import IngramSpark sales reports.
Rename your files before uploading
Here is a quirk that trips up nearly every publisher who works with Lightning Source. The sales compensation files that arrive by email do not include the sales month in the filename. Every single file lands with the same generic name. After a few months, your downloads folder becomes a wall of identically named spreadsheets with no way to tell March from September.
Before you upload, rename each file to include the month and year — something like “Lightning-Source-Sales-2026-01.xls” works well. This makes it dramatically easier to identify uploads inside Royalties HQ and prevents confusion when you are reviewing historical data months later.
The important rule: do not open or edit the file contents. Even something as minor as opening the file in Excel and re-saving it can alter the formatting enough to prevent a clean import. Rename the file in your file manager without opening it, and you will be fine.
Understanding the payment timeline
Lightning Source pays on approximately a 90-day delay from the end of the sales month. January sales will not show up as compensation until roughly April. This is consistent across Ingram’s platforms and is one of the longer payment cycles among major distributors.
This delay has real implications for your royalty workflow. The sales data in a report reflects one period, but the corresponding payment arrives much later. When you are importing data from multiple distributors — say, Amazon KDP alongside Lightning Source — you will notice that payment timelines vary significantly. Keeping track of which distributor pays when is one of the trickiest parts of managing royalties at scale.
For a broader look at how different distributors handle payment timing, see our post on distributor payment timelines.
Step-by-step: uploading your Lightning Source sales file
Once your file is 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 for it
- Royalties HQ automatically detects the file format — confirm it shows Lightning Source and click Continue
- The system validates the file contents. If everything checks out, the status will show “Ready to import”
- Click Import to bring the data in
- Each row in your file becomes a sales line, grouped into one or more sales batches
After importing, you will link a publisher income payment to each sales batch. This connects your sales data to the actual money you received from Ingram, which is what drives your royalty calculations downstream.
Royalties HQ supports 12 native file formats from major distributors, so your Lightning Source files sit alongside data from IngramSpark, Amazon KDP, Apple Books, and others — all in one place with a consistent structure and full audit trail.
Automate your monthly imports with email filters
Since Lightning Source emails you sales reports on a predictable monthly schedule, you can eliminate the manual download step entirely. Set up a Gmail filter — or equivalent rule in your email client — to automatically save those attachments to a dedicated folder in Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive.
Configure the filter to match the sender and subject line of Lightning Source’s compensation emails, then route the attachment to a specific cloud folder. If your client supports it, set a rule to rename the file with the sales month so you do not end up with a stack of identically named spreadsheets.
We wrote a full walkthrough of this approach: how to automate your Ingram sales reports. The same technique works for both Lightning Source and IngramSpark emails.
Tips for a smooth Lightning Source import
- Keep original files untouched. Rename them, but never open or edit the contents before uploading.
- Process files in order. Working through months chronologically helps you catch gaps and keeps your data tidy.
- Check the report type. Make sure you are downloading from Compensation Statements, not Reporting — Classic.
- Reconcile against payments. After importing, match each sales batch to the corresponding Ingram payment when it arrives — roughly 90 days later.
- Organise your files. A consistent folder structure makes a huge difference over time. For ideas, see our post on how to organise your distributor sales files.
Getting started
If you are setting up your royalty workflow for the first time — or finally moving away from spreadsheets — download our free guide for a complete walkthrough of the process from start to finish. For detailed documentation on every supported file format and the full import process, see importing sales data in our docs.