Proposal, July 2026
Upload the release sheet. Get back clean retailer numbers.
Prepared for Nic Burger, Digital Director, Universal Music South Africa, by Lumanaire.
The round-trip problem
Release data arrives in three shapes. None of them is a form.
The template email
UPC (SKU)
ARTIST
TITLE
FORMAT
DESCRIPTION
PRICE (OPTIONAL)
RELEASE DATE
The announcement
NEW RELEASE: Catalogue Reissues
…embargoed until announce…
2LP | UPC: 00600000000011
Smoke Grey vinyl. TP: €4.20
1CD | UPC: 00600000000103
RSD variant. TP: TBC
The system export
Territory | SKU | SKU Description
Format | SubFormat | UPC | TP (€)
Canvass Start | Canvass End | Qty
…25 columns, order varies…
And today, each shape becomes manual work.
Every canvass round means hand-building a Google Form, sending one shared link to every store, and getting back free-text answers, a "2 x" here, a "20"that might be a typo there, then interpreting, totalling and re-keying it all into the Canvas System before the deadline. The work isn't canvassing; it's conversion. In both directions. Every round.
The hub
One system owns the loop.
Upload anything
Drop in the Excel, CSV or PDF, or paste the email. The AI extracts every variant (artist, title, format, UPC, trade price, dates) no matter where the columns sit, then checks the details with you: round name, deadline, which titles are in.
One private link per store
The round mints an unguessable link for each retailer. Phone-first, numeric-only steppers, the deadline and the confidentiality notice built into the page.
Watch it come in
A live tracker shows who's opened and who's submitted. The chase list writes itself, no more scrolling a shared spreadsheet wondering who's missing.
Export, load, done
One click produces the exact Canvass Entry Report shape, plus a per-retailer breakdown. It loads straight into the Canvas System, zero re-keying.
This is not a deck
The system in this proposal is already running.
Sign in with your email, upload any release sheet you like (Excel, PDF, or a pasted email) and watch the round build itself: private retailer links, live tracker, Canvas-System export, all of it. Your sign-in code arrives by email; access is limited to invited people.
Open the live demoWhere it compounds
Every round makes the next one smarter.
A Google Form forgets everything the moment the round closes. A system remembers. Once rounds run through the hub, you accumulate a single source of truth for the questions that matter commercially:
Response history per store
Who answers fast, who needs chasing, who never opens, visible across rounds, not trapped in old form exports.
Canvass vs. actual
Compare canvassed numbers to eventual orders and sell-through, per store and per format, to sharpen every future buy-in.
Appetite by format & genre
Which stores over-index on coloured vinyl, which on catalogue rock, the demand picture builds itself round by round.
Why custom-built
Configured boards can't do the hard part.
The hard part is the reading, not the form.
Generic work-management platforms make you configure boards and forms, but the actual pain is converting arbitrary release data into those forms. That's an AI problem, and it's exactly what this hub solves natively.
No third-party per-seat licences, no SaaS platform rent.
This system is built around UMG South Africa's workflow. It doesn't ride on a third-party subscription whose pricing, limits and roadmap you don't control.
It speaks Canvas System.
The export isn't a generic CSV, it's the Canvass Entry Report, column for column. The tool bends to your workflow, not the other way around.
It runs on your approved AI stack.
The extraction engine runs on the OpenAI platform, in line with UMG's internal AI policy. In this demo build a standby engine steps in only if OpenAI is unreachable; the production build runs OpenAI-only, and either way source text is processed transiently, never stored, never used for training.
Confidentiality by design
- • Private, unguessable links per retailer, nothing public, nothing shared.
- • Embargo notices carried onto every retailer form automatically.
- • The entire site is de-indexed; search engines never see a title.
- • Pasted source text is processed transiently, never stored, never logged.
- • Even this proposal uses fictional sample data, because yours is embargoed.
- • Sign-in restricted to an invited allowlist, codes over email, no passwords.
Who's behind it
You've already used our work.
Lumanaire is the Cape Town studio behind the Content Creator Awards platform, including the live judging system you scored on at this year's awards. Same team, same stack, same obsession with software that non-technical people actually enjoy using. We design, build and run production systems for South African businesses, with an AI-accelerated build process that turns months into days, this working demo was stood up within a day of our conversation.
Next steps
Try it, break it, then let's talk.
- 01
Sign in and run a round with real release data, any format you like.
- 02
Send a test retailer link to your own phone and submit numbers from the couch.
- 03
Export the round and hold it against a real Canvass Entry Report.
- 04
Then a working session: what to keep, what to change, and what phase two looks like, auto-chase emails, retailer directory, round history analytics.