Being a good or great photographer just isn’t enough to bring in the work. Just like you use various softwares for post-processing & editing, you need a dedicated photography studio software to streamline your photography business. If you currently use spreadsheets, then you are not alone. Thousands of photographers use them daily. Spreadsheets are a good starting point, however, they are great at number crunching rather than analysing data to give you a bird’s eye view of your business.

Before deciding on which software to invest in, you should consider these options carefully:

Productivity

You need to work smarter rather than harder to streamline your workflow. A good & robust photography studio software should be able to effortlessly handle the day to day of running the business, reminders & things to do, sending quotations, making bookings, keeping track of clients & suppliers, setting up a series of workflow things for various jobs be it weddings, portraits, commercial or sporting events, updating & keeping track of all your events in one place.

Pricing & Support

Pricing & after sales support is extremely important. First decide how much you wish to spend on a photography studio software. Then make a list of 3-4 products and then see what the Support is offered after you purchase the software. Some offer a 30-day support, with some companies you need to go and attend expensive day workshops & seminars just to learn the software and get to grips with it and some offer unlimited free support. Also see on the website whether they have a phone number listed as very few websites offer this.

Marketing

You need to turbo charge your marketing efforts in these tough economic climate. One of the best and under-used marketing tools by photographers is Email Marketing. Every marketeer will say this ‘The money is in the list’. So the sooner you start to build an email list, the sooner you can start making money. Email marketing is something

Book Keeping

As a photographer you want a simple photography studio software to help you run your business which gives you a bird’s eye view of your business on a daily basis. What you want is an easy to use book keeping system to help you with your sales & purchases with a powerful enough reporting system to help you see where your business is heading.

I hope this gives you some ideas as to which photography studio software is right for you. I would welcome you to try Foto SF for free and see how it can help you to turbo charge your business.

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’ll 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…

Here is what you need to do simplify your day to day tasks:

1. Keeping track of your contacts i.e leads, customers, suppliers,

2. Sending quotations and confirmations of bookings in a professionally laid out PDF format

3. Manage your work flow tasks / reminders for things to do on specific dates

4. Raising sales invoices / inputting purchase invoices

5. Linking expenses / purchases to jobs for precise cost analysis

6. Sending / creating delivery notes to clients

7. Sending remittance notes to suppliers for payment

8. Email marketing to get your message across

9. Keeping track of all your camera / lenses / software serial numbers

10. Mail merging and sending letters to clients & prospects

11. Creating reports to see your sales, purchases, expenses

12. Forecasting figures v actual figures

13. Keeping track of appointments with a diary

14. and a lot more…..

Can you imagine trying to do all the above with spreadsheets, you can’t. It’s possible but you’ll end up replicating and duplicating things and is very time consuming. What you need is to get or create your own business software for your photography studio which will speed up your administrative tasks. If you are good with programming, you can create simple databases, but this will be time-consuming for you or you can get a off-shelf database like Foto SF Lite which is specifically designed for photographers to run their business in a seamless way. The cost of this program is only £60 + VAT

So if you are starting a new photography business or in need of getting organised. I’ll recommend you get a database and see how it will transform your business.