Photographers track costs and profits of their stock photo shoots using the Stock Production Worksheet and ImageLog that are built into fotoBiz X.
A stock shoot is actually just another assignment, but it is an assignment produced by you. There are expenses involved, as there are with any assignment. The idea of your self-produced shoot is that you hope to sell shares of the results to several buyers to recoup your costs and make a profit.
You fill out the fotoBiz Stock Production worksheet for each stock shoot, much as you would fill out an assignment estimate for a client. On your production worksheet you enter the actual cost of your expenses, rather than marking up the items as you would for your clients. You can also make notes and add other information about each shoot.
When you are finished shooting, go over your worksheet again, adjusting any items to match your actual costs. You now have a record of this self-assignment with the total cost of producing your job.
When you are finished shooting, go over your worksheet again, adjusting any items to match your actual costs. You now have a record of this self-assignment with the total cost of producing your job.
What fotoBiz will do for you now is automatically track every single sale from each stock production and keeps track of your total earnings with the profit or loss for each shoot. You can assign categories to each shoot, like travel, lifestyle, high tech or another category of your choice. You will instantly be able to see which categories of your self-productions are paying off and which are losing you money.
To have fotoBiz track your sales for each production, first create a production worksheet. As you enter your images from the shoot into the imageLog, just assign them to the production that they came from. It’s easy to do; you just click a button, and pick the shoot from a list. You’ll find a detailed description in both your manual and in the help screens. If you are importing folders of images, assign the batch of images you’re importing to the production in the default captioning screen. Again check the manual.
When you create an invoice, use the image’s tracking number to identify it. The total sales for each image will automatically be tracked in the imageLog, and the total sales for each shoot will be tracked on the Stock Production Worksheet.
One of our customers, Dan Patitucci, of PatitucciPhoto, shares how he uses fotoBiz 2.0 to help run his business: “The FotoBiz imageLog literally tracks my entire workflow; it reveals the truth of what I do and how efficient I am. Monitoring my stock productions is probably the most valuable tool in fotoBiz; at a glance I can see what shoots are making me money and which are not. Also, the style of imagery that is selling and to whom.”
The worksheet has a Post Production field for you to record notes about how the shoot went, what went right and what went wrong and what you would do differently next time. Knowing where you are profitable takes the guesswork and mystery out of running any successful business and could be the difference between those photographers who are in business tomorrow and those who are not.
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