Inside Spitfire Audio’s Shift to Scalable Royalty Payments

Spitfire Audio, a UK-based creator of virtual instrument sample libraries was handling royalty payouts through manual, Excel-based processes. The processing time took weeks and the work was cumbersome, which is why Spitfire implemented Tipalti Mass Payments to help automate its royalty disbursements. Tipalti cut processing time from weeks to minutes, giving Spitfire’s finance team more time for strategic work. The result? A more scalable payment operation for Spitfire’s growing, global music business.

This article was created in collaboration with DMN partner Tipalti.

Spitfire’s initial manual process included scheduling payments, issuing statements, and managing global payments and reporting—a time-consuming process. “If you’re a growing business, you always have to think about the long-term benefit,” says Shahid Khalid, Head of Finance at Spitfire Audio. “You either hire more people to deal with the growing amount of transactions in whatever you’re doing, or you invest in an automation tool.”

Speaking about the work his finance team was doing each quarter, Khalid continues: “It was very manual processing, in terms of global payments and also with reporting. We wanted to get that time down so that we could stop doing manual work and spend more time on value-adding activities.”

Spitfire implemented Tipalti Mass Payments to automate its royalty disbursements and remove manual data entry from the workflow. The company also used Tipalti’s self-service portal to simplify musician onboarding, which helped streamline Spitfire’s operations going forward. Tipalti’s system improved financial reporting to key stakeholders while reducing the operational burden on the finance team significantly.

For Spitfire audio, the biggest change was in how quickly royalty payments could be processed from start to finish. By automating 1,500+ global royalty payouts, Tipalti reduced a process that once took up to six weeks to just 30 minutes, while also saving Spitfire’s finance team ten weeks of payments workload each year. “It took us four to six weeks of solid work to do all the statements and payments [before Tipalti], whereas now, it’s 30 minutes of solid work,” Khalid continues. “We were spending a long time trying to get royalty payments done, and now we’re ahead.”

Spitfire Audio’s experience shows how much can change when royalty payments are processed using smart automation rather than relying on Excel spreadsheets. By streamlining 1,500+ payouts into an automated workflow, the company cut payment run time from weeks to minutes. It also reduced recurring workload and gave its finance team more room to focus on higher-value work. As Spitfire Audio grows, Tiplati’s Mass Payments automation means the process is easier to scale with the business.