If you're reading this, there's a decent chance you opened a spreadsheet recently, looked at it for a long minute, and quietly closed it again. Maybe you were trying to figure out what you actually earned in March. Maybe you were trying to remember whether you'd already pulled the KDP report or whether that was last month. Maybe you just wanted a number — one honest, simple number — and couldn't get to it without an hour of work you didn't have.
If that's you, I want to start by saying something I think you need to hear: you're not behind, you're not bad at this, and you're definitely not the only one. This particular flavor of confusion is one of the most universal experiences in indie publishing, and almost nobody talks about it out loud.
Let's talk about it.
Why this is so hard
When you publish one book through one distributor, knowing what you earned is easy. The dashboard shows you. You're done.
The trouble starts the moment you have a second income stream. And then a third. And by the time you're publishing wide — KDP for Amazon, IngramSpark for everywhere else in print, ACX or Findaway for audio, maybe Draft2Digital for the rest of the ebook retailers, maybe direct sales on top of that — you're not running one business anymore. You're running five or six tiny businesses that happen to share your name, each with its own dashboard, its own report format, its own pay schedule, and its own way of reporting numbers.
KDP pays you about 60 days after the month ends. ACX pays monthly, but the report you can download doesn't always match what you can see in the dashboard. Findaway splits your earnings across Library, Retail, and Pool channels — which sound like internal jargon because they are. IngramSpark reports separately for print and for whatever extended distribution you've enabled. Draft2Digital aggregates across half a dozen retailers and gives you one number that hides the fact that Apple, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble all paid differently. Some of your money is in dollars, some is in pounds, some is in euros, and some is in yen.
There is no single screen anywhere that tells you what you earned last month. It doesn't exist. Not on any distributor's site, not anywhere. The only place that number can live is somewhere you build yourself.
That's the problem. And it's not your fault.
The shape of the manual fix
If you want to know your real monthly total, the honest answer is that you have to do the work yourself. The good news is that there's a way to do it that's much less painful than what most publishers are doing, and it takes about 30 minutes a month if you stick to a rhythm.
Here's the rhythm:
Pick one day a month and put it on the calendar. Around the 5th of the month works well — by then, last month's numbers are mostly settled at most distributors. Treat it like a meeting with yourself. Same day every month. The consistency matters more than the day you pick.
Download every report on that day, in one sitting. Don't try to do KDP on the 5th and ACX on the 12th. Doing them all together is what makes the totals add up. Open each distributor in turn: KDP, IngramSpark, ACX, Findaway, Draft2Digital, anything else you use. Download last month's report from each. Don't open them yet. Just get them all in one folder.
Use one spreadsheet, with one row per distributor per month. Not one row per sale. Not one tab per distributor. One row, per distributor, per month. The columns are: month, distributor, gross earnings in their currency, currency, gross earnings in your home currency. Five columns. That's it. The temptation to track every sale is the thing that makes spreadsheets collapse — resist it. You're trying to know your monthly total, not your unit-level history.
Convert currencies once, on the day you do the work, using one source. Pick a single exchange rate site (xe.com works fine) and look up the rates on the day you're doing the reconciliation. Apply them to every non-home-currency row. Don't try to match the exact rate the distributor used — you'll never win that game. The goal is consistency, not perfection.
Total the column. That's your number.
That's the whole system. Five columns, 30 minutes, one day a month. If you do this consistently, you'll know what you earned each month within a few days of the data being available. You'll be ahead of where most indie publishers are.
Why this is still imperfect
The manual fix works, but I want to be honest about its limits, because if you do it for a year and start feeling like something's off, you should know why.
Your monthly totals will drift slightly from what eventually hits your bank account. KDP's actual currency conversion will be a little different from xe.com's. Returns will show up two months later and your March number will quietly become wrong. Some distributors revise their numbers after the fact. Findaway's channel split won't show up in your simple total because you flattened it. None of this is catastrophic — your number will be within a few percent of reality, which is far better than not having a number at all — but it's not perfect, and it's not designed to handle royalty splits to anyone else.
The moment you have to share that money with a co-author, a narrator on royalty share, an editor on profit share, or anyone else, the simple spreadsheet stops being enough. Now you need to know not just what you earned, but what they earned, on which book, in which format, in which month, in which currency, with which advance still owed against it. That's a different problem, and a much bigger one.
When the spreadsheet stops working
Most indie publishers hit a moment when the spreadsheet they built — even a good one — stops keeping up with the business. It usually happens for one of these reasons:
You add a fourth or fifth distributor, and the manual reconciliation starts taking a full afternoon instead of 30 minutes. You take on a co-author, and suddenly you need to track who owns what percentage of which edition. You pay an advance, and you need to know when it's earned out across all the income streams. You realize you've been guessing on currency conversion for a year and the cumulative drift is real money. You sit down to do quarterly statements and the spreadsheet that handled monthly totals doesn't have the structure for per-author breakdowns.
If you're at one of those moments, the spreadsheet isn't failing — you've outgrown it. That's growth, not failure. It means your business is real enough that the tools that worked at the start aren't enough anymore.
How Royaltally handles this part
I built Royaltally for this exact problem, because I'm an indie audiobook publisher and narrator and I lived in this spreadsheet for years before I got tired of it.
You upload your distributor reports — KDP, IngramSpark, ACX, Findaway, Draft2Digital — and Royaltally reads them, parses out every line, converts currencies automatically using daily rates, matches each earning to the right title and edition in your catalog, and gives you one clean number for the month. If you have royalty holders, it calculates their share too, against the right percentages on the right editions, with advances applied where they should be. When quarterly statement time comes, the PDFs generate themselves.
It's the system I wished existed five years ago, built by someone who actually has to do this work every month.
You can start with up to 3 titles for free, no credit card. If knowing your monthly number in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes sounds like it would change your week, come take a look.
And if you'd rather stick with the spreadsheet for now — that's a completely reasonable choice. The manual fix above genuinely works. Use it, get your rhythm, and if you outgrow it later, Royaltally will be here.
Either way: you've got this. You're not behind. And next month, you're going to know your number.