Office side of Photography Business

I shoot about 80-90 sessions/weddings per year

Some of the sessions are 1 hour sessions some weddings are 6 hours weddings it makes a lot of clients every year !

How do you guys tracking your clients and booking your sessions ?

Is there any scheduling software available on the market ? How do you track payments. How do you prevent double booking and setting up timing etc
I use excel, Google calendar plus traditional calendar, this way I have everything written down in 3 places

How do you track you income and expenses ?? Taxes etc.... Tell me something about Office in photography business

I can't help you on the scheduling end,
but for the business end you should establish a relationship with an accountant, who will then recommend software. QuickBooks is popular, most accountants have it so you can send them files, and it does have a (somewhat limited) ability to maintain a client database that you can export for marketing purposes.

Accountants cost less than most people think, and could save you more than you imagine.

I agree with Curtis, but you could take a look at:
Pro Studio Manager

Or Google: Open source accounting software photography

I remember that someone once wrote some biz software specifically for photographers, but it was expensive. Then later it became free, but I can't recall the name. Maybe someone else can come up with it.

Why not look at using Microsoft Outlook as a scheduling tool, and a contact list for your clients. We use it at work to schedule multiple personnel and multiple topics at a time, and have never had a problem with it. You can also export files from it and sync to your Google calendar and contacts as a back up. It is easy to use, and readily accessible by many, and depending on the cell phone you use it can be synced up to the calendar on it to have your schedule with you at all times. As for accounting software you I would probably go with Quick Books. Excel will work, but Quick Books is a lot more user friendly. Hope this has been of some help.

http://www.filemaker.c​om

Possible solution for contact management.

benji25 wrote in post #16368406
http://www.filemaker.c​om

Possible solution for contact management.

...I'm a filemaker guru, but its overkill for a simple contact manager unless you are building a custom solution to run your entire business. And while the starter solutions are good: customizing a solution properly requires a bit of knowledge if you want to do it properly. Only look at filemaker if you have bigger plans in mind. I think Filemaker is AWESOME. But I'm not sure it fits what the OP wants.

There is a huge range of solutions out there. Some of them are purpose built photography applications. Others are general purpose applications. Most have free trials so you can check them out.

You need to figure out what solution best fits your business. Start by writing down what your requirements of a system are. Figure out how you want your "everyday workflow" to work. For example: "Customer calls, I enter their details into my i-pad", if this is your workflow, then you need an application that works on an i-pad! Your list of requirements or "specs" will help you narrow down your search for the best set of tools for your business.

Allow a bit of time to do this properly. I spent a few months searching for the right solution for me: and I came up with nothing. But thats because I'm a fussy bugger, so now I'm building my own system using the before-mentioned Filemaker.

I would look at a few of the dedicated photography solutions. Out of all the ones I evaluated ShootQ came out tops for the online solutions. Its comprehensive, coded well (there are some sites that literally don't work!) and should do most of the things that you want it to do. It has a monthly subscription charge. For an off-line solution look at Lightblue Software: they recently did a major upgrade on their product and it looks great and works well. There is a one-off licence fee, and (I think) an ongoing fee if you want to use the solution online.

But there really is a lot of stuff out there. Check out Google Apps, google "photography management software" and check those out, and try a lot of the trials. Look for something that is right for how you work. Beware of "fly by nighters" trying to cash in on the internet boom in Apps though, if the website looks dodgy and things don't seem right, then its right to trust your gut.

I'd look at a combination of ShootQ and Quickbooks Online. And honestly if ShootQ had a way to track expenses I'd probably drop Quickbooks.

I won't lie about this, it took me 24 hours or so to set ShootQ up and I am well versed in business process and project management software so I'd imagine it could take some people a couple of weeks. But once it is set up, it just does what its supposed to do. Its already saving me about 8 hours a week between managing calendaring, contracts and payments.

Best thing is its super easy to put upgrade opportunities in front of your client. 9 of the 11 signed contracts I've used ShootQ to book have upgraded themselves.

banquetbear wrote in post #16368467
...I'm a filemaker guru, but its overkill for a simple contact manager unless you are building a custom solution to run your entire business. And while the starter solutions are good: customizing a solution properly requires a bit of knowledge if you want to do it properly. Only look at filemaker if you have bigger plans in mind. I think Filemaker is AWESOME. But I'm not sure it fits what the OP wants.

There is a huge range of solutions out there. Some of them are purpose built photography applications. Others are general purpose applications. Most have free trials so you can check them out.

You need to figure out what solution best fits your business. Start by writing down what your requirements of a system are. Figure out how you want your "everyday workflow" to work. For example: "Customer calls, I enter their details into my i-pad", if this is your workflow, then you need an application that works on an i-pad! Your list of requirements or "specs" will help you narrow down your search for the best set of tools for your business.

Allow a bit of time to do this properly. I spent a few months searching for the right solution for me: and I came up with nothing. But thats because I'm a fussy bugger, so now I'm building my own system using the before-mentioned Filemaker.

I would look at a few of the dedicated photography solutions. Out of all the ones I evaluated ShootQ came out tops for the online solutions. Its comprehensive, coded well (there are some sites that literally don't work!) and should do most of the things that you want it to do. It has a monthly subscription charge. For an off-line solution look at Lightblue Software: they recently did a major upgrade on their product and it looks great and works well. There is a one-off licence fee, and (I think) an ongoing fee if you want to use the solution online.

But there really is a lot of stuff out there. Check out Google Apps, google "photography management software" and check those out, and try a lot of the trials. Look for something that is right for how you work. Beware of "fly by nighters" trying to cash in on the internet boom in Apps though, if the website looks dodgy and things don't seem right, then its right to trust your gut.

Well the process started with me googling for Bento but apparently that is no longer made and I knew the next step up was Filemaker as they are (were?) the same company.

You can get Bento for ipad or mac, pretty sure thats the case as I got Bento for ipad but in the end decided it was more work than I wanted to do to end up with what I felt I needed.

www.studiocloud.com is pretty common and free.

Many people use simply accounting and quickbooks for the other back end stuff, or they outsource it completely. They cost but when you get a hang of using them it's a good transferable skill to have, simply accounting and Intuit are pretty standard all over.

There's a ton of apps for accounting and bookkeeping too, especially on chrome...one off the top of my head is wave https://www.waveapps.c​om/