Narrative
A run is a pipeline. Break any stage and the money stalls, invisibly.
A client asks why their for Q3 hasn't appeared on the quarterly statement. Your first job is to locate the blockage. But you cannot locate a blockage you haven't mapped.
The royalty run is the operational pipeline that turns raw usage data into money in a payee's account. It has eight stages, each of which can fail silently. When income sits unpaid it is almost always because something broke in this pipe, not because the platform didn't report, not because didn't stream, and not because the contract was wrong. Usually: bad data, an unmatched line, a held reserve, or a minimum-threshold carry-forward.
Walk the pipe before you chase anyone.