is not a form you file once. At catalogue scale it is a production line, and the backlog is money.
A publisher administering a few thousand works doesn't "register the catalogue" and move on. Every work needs a registration at every society that collects for it, a claim on every platform where it earns, in every territory that matters. New works arrive weekly. Catalogues are bought and sold. Writers change publishers. Splits get renegotiated. Each event re-opens work you thought was finished.
Two terms before we start. Claiming is asserting your client's share of a work against usage and income that already exist, at a society, on a platform, in a database. The chain of agreement is the paper trail that proves the claim: the the writers signed, the agreement, any assignments or amendments since. Every claim you make is only as strong as the chain behind it.
When claiming stalls, income doesn't vanish. It sits in suspense: held by a society or platform, attributed to nobody, paying nobody. A well-run operation keeps that pool small and young. A neglected one watches it grow, age, and eventually leak away under the societies' release rules. This module is about running the operation so it doesn't.