This article is part of our Complete Guide to Royalty Management.
You know your spreadsheets aren’t cutting it anymore. The formulas are fragile, the process eats up days every quarter, and you live in fear of sending an author the wrong number. But the thing stopping you from switching isn’t a lack of motivation. It’s the migration.
The idea of moving years of royalty data out of Excel and into new software feels overwhelming. What if something gets lost? What if the numbers don’t match? What if it takes weeks? These are reasonable concerns, and every publisher we work with has had them. The good news is that migrating your royalty data is far less painful than most people expect.
Take stock of what you have
Before you touch any software, spend an hour getting a clear picture of your data. You don’t need everything organized perfectly. You just need to know what exists and where it lives.
Titles and ISBNs. You need a list of every book you publish, along with the product identifiers (ISBNs, ASINs) for each format. If you have a spreadsheet with your catalogue in it, you’re already most of the way there.
Rights holders. A list of your authors, illustrators, translators, and anyone else who earns royalties. At minimum, you need their name and either an email address or a unique code you use internally.
Contracts and royalty terms. The royalty rates, advance amounts, and any tiered structures you’ve agreed to. These don’t need to be in a specific format yet. You just need to know where to find them.
Sales data. If you plan to do a full historical import, you’ll need the actual sales files from your distributors. If you’re doing a clean cutover, you just need summary totals (units sold and royalties earned per product). We’ll cover both approaches below.
That’s the full list. If you can locate those four things, you have everything you need to get started.
What royalty software actually imports
One of the biggest fears about migration is that you’ll have to manually re-enter everything. That’s not how it works. Purpose-built royalty software uses bulk CSV imports to bring your data in quickly.
In Royalties HQ, you can import:
- Titles and products with ISBNs, ASINs, publication dates, page counts, and royalty period settings. Each format of a book (softcover, hardcover, ebook, audiobook) is imported as its own product row. You download a CSV template, fill it in, upload it, and the system validates everything before importing.
- Rights holders with names, email addresses, rights holder codes, and contact details. Again, there’s a CSV template. The system checks for duplicates and flags problems before anything is saved.
- Contracts linking rights holders to titles with their royalty rates, advance balances, and tier structures.
- Sales data in 10+ formats from major distributors including Amazon KDP, Lightning Source, Ingram CoreSource, ACX, Google Play, Apple Books, Draft2Digital, and Findaway/INaudio. For sales from other sources like your own website or wholesale orders, there’s a generic CSV template that covers anything else.
The key thing to understand is that native format files from your distributors can be uploaded without any changes. You don’t need to reformat Amazon KDP reports or restructure Lightning Source files. Just drop them in as-is.
How long does it actually take?
This is the question everyone asks, and the honest answer is: it depends on your catalogue size and which approach you choose. But here are some realistic benchmarks.
A publisher with 50 titles and 10 rights holders can typically get fully set up in a single day. Importing titles and rights holders takes under an hour. Setting up contracts takes a few hours. Importing the first batch of sales data takes minutes.
A publisher with 500+ titles will need a few days spread over a week or two. The bulk import tools do the heavy lifting, but you’ll want to review the data in stages rather than rushing through it.
The part that takes the longest is almost never the software. It’s gathering your existing data, especially if your sales files are scattered across email inboxes, shared drives, and distributor dashboards. If you organize your distributor sales files before you start, the actual import process goes much faster.
Two approaches to migration
There are really only two ways to handle the transition, and both are perfectly valid. We’ve written a detailed comparison of the two approaches, but here’s the short version.
Full historical import. You import all your sales data from the very beginning and recreate your royalty history inside the new system. Your authors get a complete picture of every sale and every statement in one place. The trade-off is more upfront work gathering old sales files, and your recreated statements may not match previous ones to the penny due to rounding and period differences.
Clean cutover. You pick a date, start importing sales data from that point forward, and enter summary totals for everything before that date. This is faster and simpler. The summary figures ensure tiered royalty rates still calculate correctly, but your authors won’t see month-by-month detail for the period before the cutover.
Most publishers with smaller catalogues go with the full import. Larger publishers, or those with messy historical data, tend to prefer the clean cutover. Neither choice is wrong. You can download our free guide for more help deciding which approach fits your situation.
Watch out for spreadsheet formatting
Here’s a practical tip that saves a lot of headaches. When you’re preparing your CSV files for import, be careful with Excel’s auto-formatting. It loves to silently convert long numbers like ISBNs into scientific notation, reformat dates based on your locale, and strip leading zeros from codes.
The fix is simple: format all your cells as plain text before entering data. Or better yet, use Google Sheets, which is less aggressive about reformatting your data. This one step prevents the most common import errors we see.
Getting started with Royalties HQ
Royalties HQ is built to make this transition straightforward. Every import uses a downloadable CSV template that shows you exactly what fields are expected and what format they need to be in. The system validates your data before importing and shows you a preview so you can catch problems before they’re saved.
If you want to see the specifics of how each import works, our importing titles and products documentation walks through the full process step by step.
You don’t need to import everything at once, either. Many publishers start with titles and rights holders, set up a few contracts, then import their first month of sales data to see the whole process end to end. Once you’re comfortable, you can go back and bring in historical data or add the rest of your catalogue.
If you’ve been struggling with Excel and putting off the switch because migration feels too daunting, take it from the publishers who’ve already made the move: the hardest part is deciding to start. The actual process is far simpler than the spreadsheet you’re replacing.