Organizing Your Distributor Sales Files

This article is part of our Complete Guide to Royalty Management.

You have sales reports coming in from Amazon KDP, Ingram, Lightning Source, ACX, Apple Books, and possibly a handful of others. Each distributor sends files on a different schedule, in a different format, with a different naming convention. At some point, someone on your team downloads a file, edits a column, saves it to their desktop, and now nobody knows which version is the correct one. Sound familiar?

The fix is not a better spreadsheet. It is a file organization system that scales as your catalog and distributor list grow. Here is how to set one up from scratch.

Start with cloud storage #

Local folders on someone’s laptop are where sales files go to get lost. Move everything to a shared cloud storage platform like Google Drive or Dropbox. Both offer real-time syncing, version history, and team access controls, which solves half of the “which version is correct?” problem before you even set up a folder structure.

Google Drive has a slight edge for publishers who also use Gmail, since you can automate Ingram sales reports by routing email attachments directly into Drive folders. But either platform works. The important thing is that your sales files live in one shared location that your whole team can access.

Build a folder structure that scales #

A flat folder full of files breaks down the moment you have more than a few months of data. Instead, organize by year, then quarter, then distributor:

Sales Reports/
  2026/
    Q1/
      Amazon-KDP/
      IngramSpark/
      Lightning-Source/
      ACX/
      Apple-Books/
    Q2/
      Amazon-KDP/
      IngramSpark/
      ...
  2025/
    Q1/
    Q2/
    Q3/
    Q4/

This pattern works because it mirrors how publishers actually think about their data. Royalty periods are usually quarterly, so grouping by quarter puts all the files you need for a single royalty run in one place. Adding a new distributor means adding one folder per quarter. Adding a new year means copying the structure forward.

Keep it simple. Do not create subfolders by format type or marketplace within each distributor folder. That level of granularity adds complexity without much benefit, and it makes the drag-and-drop import step harder later on.

Use original filenames from your distributors #

This is where most publishers make a critical mistake. They rename every file using their own convention, or worse, they open the file and start editing columns before saving. Never edit the original sales files. Royalty software like Royalties HQ expects the raw file exactly as the distributor provided it. Modifying column headers, deleting rows, or changing cell formats can prevent the file from being recognized during import.

If you need to rename files for clarity, that is fine. Renaming a file (without opening and editing it) does not change its contents. A pattern like KDP-Sales-2026-03.xlsx makes files easy to identify at a glance. But the data inside the file should stay untouched.

If you want to track additional context like the date you downloaded the file or which team member handled it, keep a separate log. A simple shared spreadsheet works. Just do not bake that information into the sales file itself.

Create a pre-import checklist #

Before each royalty run, work through a short checklist to make sure nothing slips through the cracks. Here is a starting point:

• All distributor files received. Check that you have files from every active sales channel for the period. Missing a distributor means missing sales, which means underpaying authors.
• Files are in the correct quarter folder. It is easy to accidentally drop a March file into the Q2 folder. Double-check the dates.
• No files have been edited. Confirm that the files in your cloud storage are the originals. If someone opened a file in Excel and hit save, the formatting may have changed even if no data was deliberately modified.
• Custom sales data prepared. If you have sales from sources that are not natively supported (your own website, wholesale, or in-person events), prepare those using your royalty software’s import template before you start.
• Previous period fully closed. Make sure the last royalty run is complete and all payments are recorded before importing new data.

Print this checklist or keep it pinned in your project management tool. It takes five minutes to run through and can save you hours of troubleshooting. If you download our free guide, it includes a printable version you can customize for your workflow.

What about files from unsupported distributors? #

Not every distributor format will be natively supported by your royalty software. For those sources, you will typically need to map the data into a generic import template. This is the one exception to the “never edit the file” rule. Keep the original distributor file untouched in your cloud storage, and create a separate file using the import template.

Name the template file something obvious, like Custom-Import-WholesaleSales-2026-Q1.csv, and store it alongside the original in the same distributor folder. That way you always have the source data to refer back to if questions come up later.

Drag, drop, and done in Royalties HQ #

Once your files are organized, the actual import step is the easy part. In Royalties HQ, go to Add New Sales and drag your sales file into the upload area. The system automatically recognizes files from all 10 natively supported formats, including Amazon KDP, IngramSpark, Lightning Source, ACX, Apple Books, Google Play, Draft2Digital, and more.

Each row in the sales file becomes a sales line, grouped into sales batches that you can review before finalizing. Because you kept the original files untouched, the auto-detection works every time. No reformatting, no column mapping, no guessing. For the full walkthrough, see the importing sales data documentation.

For files from unsupported sources, Royalties HQ provides a downloadable CSV template that you can use to import sales from any channel, whether that is your own e-commerce store, in-person events, or a niche distributor.

The system in practice #

Here is what a typical quarterly royalty run looks like with this system in place:

1. Sales files arrive from distributors (some by email, some downloaded from dashboards).
2. Files go straight into the correct cloud storage folder: year, quarter, distributor.
3. You run through your pre-import checklist.
4. You drag each file into Royalties HQ and import.
5. Sales batches are created, ready for royalty processing.

No hunting through email threads. No wondering if a file was already imported. No version conflicts. The whole process becomes predictable and repeatable, even as your catalog and distributor list grow.

Start with the folder structure. Everything else builds on that foundation. Once your files have a home, the rest of the workflow falls into place naturally.