Before our latest upgrade, we used to ask members to either accept, decline or defer if they are entitled to payment after we have allocated money to a work. We call this ‘claiming’ a payment.

In our new process, we’ll only ask publisher members to confirm they are entitled to receive payments for works before the payment amount has been determined. We will call this ‘verifying’ entitlement to receive a future payment.

We'll ask publishers to ‘Verify’ works once, reducing your workload and increasing our speed and efficiency with processing your payments. Payments can be released to you as soon as a distribution is run.

Note, this process only applies to new works in our data. We will not be asking publishers to ‘Verify’ a work if you have already registered it with payment shares or has previously received a payment from us in the past.

We will email you to ask publishers to log into their online account to ‘verify’ publications selected for distribution that we have not previously paid you for.

Publishers will be prompted with actions and guided through the verification process online. We will notify publishers by email if you have new works to verify and provide 14 days to respond.

What happens if I don’t verify a work within 14 days?

If publishers don’t verify a work within 14 days of our request, we will assume that they are entitled to receive our payment for that work.

If the work is a book, we will also assume that publishers have arrangements to share Copyright Agency payments with one or more authors and/or illustrators, and we’ll later ask for payment share information.

If you are a publisher, it is important that you inform us as soon as possible if you are not entitled to payments for a title. This includes letting us know if you sell an imprint or rights have reverted to an author.

All these options to update the works will be available to publishers and collecting management organisations on the new Member Portal. You will be prompted with actions and guided through the verification process online.

Does that mean I won’t have a claims deadline anymore?

That's right, there will no deadlines by which you need to submit your ‘Pending Claim’. We will email to alert you when we have new works for you to ‘Verify’. However, it is important you update works that you are not entitled to collect Copyright Agency payment for. You will have 14 days to complete this.

Will I still be able to defer works in a claim?

No, you will no longer have an option to ‘Defer’ when ‘Verifying a work’. You will need to select from a list of actions provided, and you will be guided through the process online.

If you take no action within 14 days of Copyright Agency sending you an email, we will assume our research is correct and that you are entitled to collect our payment for those works.

Will I still be able to save my progress when verifying a work?

No, we won’t require you to action all works at once so you won’t need to save your progress. You can just verify a few works at a time if you prefer, and the new Member Portal will keep those that you haven’t actioned for when you next log in.

Remember, it is important you update works that you are not entitled to collect Copyright Agency payment for.

Remember, we will provide you 14 days after receiving our email notification to complete this task. If you don’t verify a work within 14 days of Copyright Agency sending you an email, we will assume our research is correct and that you are entitled to collect our payment for those works.

Will I be able to upload a spreadsheet to verify many works at once?

No, but it is easy to apply one action to multiple lines at once on the Member Portal. We will show you how when the new system is launched.

If you need to cross-check whether the titles are yours or not, you will still be able to export the list of ‘Unverified’ works from the Member Portal.

 See also: What's changed about Payments, and What's Changed about Shares