Juggling the day to day running of a photography business can take time & efforts on your part. This is the work which no one likes, paperwork, invoices, etc. Important thing is not to replicate and duplicate things, this takes up more time than we realise and lost time equals losing money. Every business (photography or not) needs to have a system in place. Keeping track of your contacts, equipment, jobs, sales, purchases, marketing, diary & products and a lot more.
Many photographers use a spreadsheet to run their business. Spreadsheets are fine if you want to crunch numbers and perform automatic calculations, create charts, ‘what if’ scenarios or keep track of simple list of data. However, you will end up entering the same values of information into multiple spreadsheets. This is not time efficient and you need to update different files if you are tracking related information in several spreadsheets. When you use a spreadsheet, viewing the set of data is not easy and quite often requires lots of scrolling to view it!!
Alternative to spreadsheets is a database management system which will simplify your work and allow you more time to do whatever you want, whether being behind the camera or with your family! A database will help you manage all your day to day business tasks with ease, answer questions and solve problems, link related data, view data in different ways and a lot lot more…