What should be arriving
Establishing what you are entitled to across the recording, the underlying work and your performances.
Music
Royalties.
Music income moves on data. A use is logged, matched against a registration, and paid to whoever the registration says is entitled. Where that registration is wrong, incomplete or missing, the money is still generated. It simply goes somewhere else.
What this looks like when it goes wrong
The commonest version is a release that went out with incomplete information. A writer left off a registration, a name spelled differently across services, a work registered by one collaborator and never confirmed by the others, or the same work registered twice on inconsistent terms. Nobody notices, because nothing announces itself. There is simply no payment where there should have been one.
The next version is money arriving somewhere it should no longer arrive. Accounts opened by a former manager, a company since dissolved, an old arrangement nobody has revisited. The payment is made correctly according to the records held. The records are out of date.
Then there is income never claimed at all. Different uses generate different kinds of income for different kinds of rightholder, and a person can be owed in one capacity while being paid in another. Performers see this most often, because their entitlement in recordings of their performances is separate from the entitlement of whoever owns the recording.
The last version is a statement that cannot be checked. Money arrives, the figure looks plausible, and there is no practical way for the person receiving it to tell whether it corresponds to the use that occurred or to the split that was agreed.
What actually decides it
Registration and metadata determine whether money reaches the right person. This is administrative work nobody enjoys and it is the largest single cause of income going astray. What matters is the information attached to the release itself: the identifiers, the credited writers and performers, the ownership shares as registered, and whether the same information appears consistently everywhere the track exists.
In the UK, separate organisations administer different rights, and one use can generate more than one stream of income payable to more than one kind of rightholder. Which body is relevant depends on the right involved and the capacity in which you hold it. The mechanics differ between them and change over time, which is a reason to establish your own position rather than assume that whatever worked for somebody else applies to you.
Registrations have to agree with the agreements. A split confirmed in writing but registered differently will be paid as registered rather than as agreed, and correcting that is a question of evidence: the signed split, the correspondence, the credits, the payment history. Where nothing was ever signed, the position has to be built from what was actually done.
Income earned abroad is collected under whatever arrangements exist in that territory, and being registered in the UK does not automatically mean being paid everywhere. What is recoverable historically depends on where the money is sitting and on the rules of the body holding it, and those rules are not uniform. It is worth finding out early what is still reachable, because not all of it remains reachable indefinitely.
What we do
Registration and metadata review
Checking what is registered against what was agreed, and finding where the two do not match.
Income that did not arrive
Establishing where money that was earned has ended up, and what it takes to redirect it.
Correcting the record
Putting registrations, credits and ownership data into a state that pays properly from here on.
Statements and entitlement
Testing what has been paid against what the agreements and registrations say should have been.
Recovery
Pursuing historic income where it is still reachable, and saying plainly when it is not.
When to spend nothing
If the catalogue is small and quiet, a full reconciliation will cost more than it returns. The honest answer for a great deal of recorded music is that the administration is imperfect and the sums involved do not justify fixing it. What is always worth doing is getting the registration right for anything new, because that costs nothing but attention and it is the part that compounds.
It is also worth separating two problems that feel identical from the inside. Music that is not earning because nobody is listening is not a royalties problem, and no amount of administrative work will change it. What is described here recovers money that was genuinely generated. It does not create an audience.
Before anything is sent
Positions harden the moment the other side takes advice, and the quiet routes stop being available once a demand has gone out. While nothing has been sent, everything is still open.