CleaRoyalty is a royalty operations platform for businesses that pay creators based on sales. We automate the painful parts so businesses can pay people accurately and on time without drowning in spreadsheets.
Every independent label, plugin company, course platform, and publisher has the same problem. They signed contracts promising creators a percentage of revenue. Then life happened. Sales come from multiple stores. Expenses come from a dozen sources. Bundles mix products from different creators. Contracts have different rates, different deductions, different terms.
So statements fall behind. A quarter becomes six months becomes a year. Creators stop trusting the numbers. Relationships that started with a handshake end with silence and suspicion. Not because anyone intended to cheat anyone, but because the operational burden of doing it right exceeded the time available to do it at all.
We built CleaRoyalty because we lived this problem. We ran multiple brands with dozens of royalty-bearing products across different categories and sales channels. We fell behind on statements. We watched good relationships strain under the weight of unexplained $0 checks. We knew the math was right but couldn't prove it fast enough to matter. So we built the system we needed, and then we realized everyone like us needed it too.
A royalty statement that says "$0 owed" without showing why is not a statement. It's a source of suspicion. Every number CleaRoyalty produces explains itself. Gross receipts on line one, every deduction labeled and traceable, net receipts visible, rate applied, final amount shown. The creator doesn't have to trust a black box. They can see the math.
We don't automate to save time, although it does. We automate because humans pulling data from nine sources and pasting it into spreadsheets make mistakes. The pipeline exists to eliminate the gap between what the data says and what the spreadsheet says. Consistency is a feature.
The people who make the products that generate the revenue deserve to understand how their share was calculated. They deserve to see it on time. They deserve a portal where they can verify every number. CleaRoyalty exists to make that relationship work, not to help businesses pay less. If the math says money is owed, money is owed.
Every royalty agreement is different. Flat rates, tiered rates, admin fees, expense deductions, advance recoupment, reserve holdbacks, multi-recipient splits. The industry tried to solve this with custom software that works for one company and breaks for everyone else. We treat contract terms as parameters in a formula engine. New contract structures don't require new code. They require new answers to the same questions.
CleaRoyalty calculates what's owed and tells your payment system to pay it. The money moves from your bank account to your creators' bank accounts through your existing AP workflow. We are the brain, not the bank. The moment a platform sits between a business and its creators' paychecks, the incentives get complicated. We stay on the side of accuracy and transparency, not financial intermediation.
Royalty operations are genuinely complex. That complexity doesn't go away. But it can be contained behind interfaces that make sense to a business owner who has never thought about royalty flow in their life. The contract builder asks eight questions. The statement shows five columns. The admin dashboard has one button that says "publish." The complexity lives in the engine, not in the experience.
When a statement is published, the timestamp is permanent. The numbers are permanent. The methodology is permanent. If a correction is needed later, the original stays in the record and the amendment sits alongside it. A system where published numbers can be quietly edited is a system that invites suspicion. A system where every version is preserved and every change is visible is a system that earns trust by making deception structurally impossible.