Why PRS Files Break Spreadsheets
Your PRS royalty statement has one row for every single use of every single work in every single territory. If you have 50 registered works, each played in 10 countries, that's 500 rows per quarter — from that alone. Add in BBC, ITV, streaming, radio, live performances, and international collections, and the numbers grow fast.
Active library music and production music composers regularly receive statements with 20,000 to 50,000 rows per quarter. Load a few years and you're looking at hundreds of thousands of rows.
What Happens in Excel
Excel technically opens the file, but then:
- Scrolling becomes sluggish
- Sorting takes 30 seconds or more
- Filtering is painfully slow
- Pivot tables take ages to build and refresh
- Formulas across thousands of rows grind the application to a halt
- Your laptop fan starts spinning
And this is for a single statement. Try combining multiple quarters for trend analysis and Excel effectively becomes unusable.
Google Sheets Is Worse
Google Sheets runs in a browser, which means even less processing power and memory available. It has a cell limit of roughly 10 million cells, and performance drops off steeply well before that. Plus you're uploading your private financial data to Google's servers.
The Real Problem
Spreadsheets are general-purpose tools. They're brilliant for budgets, project plans, and shopping lists. They're not designed for analysing tens of thousands of rows of structured royalty data from a specific format.
What you actually need is something that understands PRS statement formats, can handle the volume, and gives you the answers without building formulas and pivot tables every quarter.
What RoyaltyPro Does Differently
RoyaltyPro is a desktop application built specifically for PRS and MCPS royalty statements. Drag in your CSV files — as many as you have, from as many quarters as you've saved — and see your results in seconds.
No row limits. No formulas. No pivot tables. No uploading to the cloud. Your data stays on your computer and the analysis happens locally.
For a walkthrough of what your PRS CSV actually contains, see our guide to reading your PRS CSV download. For the bigger picture, see our complete PRS statement guide.