Accounting for photographers: Make Money, Not Mistakes: Bookkeeping for Photographers

Michelle Alexander is a CPA and implementation consultant for Artificial Intelligence-powered financial risk discovery technology. She has a Master’s of Professional Accounting from the University of Saskatchewan, and has worked in external audit compliance and various finance roles for Government and Big 4. In her spare time you’ll find her traveling the world, shopping for antique jewelry, and painting watercolour floral arrangements. From small businesses to real estate agents, find valuable insights to optimize your tax savings. Tax deductions for training sessions and education are available in addition to education tax credits, which are granted to those enrolled in post-secondary education. This means that you can keep learning and improving while taking advantage of tax breaks at the same time.

QuickBooks is a very powerful tool that simplifies bookkeeping for photographers so that they can focus on their clients. Regardless of whether you’re starting out trying to scale your photography business this guide will help you get the essentials of using QuickBooks Online. It will help you organize your finances, track profitability and be prepared for tax season. Iris is a solid project management system of photographers, and it can also handle the financial side of things if needed. This accounting software includes features like a comprehensive invoice system, and payment processing, as well as custom contracts and client questionnaires. You can also integrate Quickbooks into Iris to give you more useful financial tools and features for your business.

Best Accounting Software for Photographers

• With its integrations and automation capabilities, photographers can focus on their creative work while efficiently managing their financial tasks.
• All that said, the Quickbooks website makes it easy to compare features and pricing for their different options, so you can determine what fits your needs best.
• This allows them to increase business savings and invest in new resources.

As with many other industries, photographers can take advantage of the costs of training sessions, education, certifications, and other related expenses. This allows you to continually advance your skills both in photography and business. Based on the scope of photography work that you perform, you may choose to rent additional equipment for specific projects.

How Much Does QuickBooks Online Advanced Cost?

As a photography business owner, you have a multitude of options when it comes to claiming write-offs on your business tax returns. As you’ve learned from the list above, everything from equipment and software to mileage and advertising could provide relief. Create graphs, charts, and dashboards to quickly assess where your income is coming from and which expenses are cutting into your bottom line. Zoom into detailed data with expense tracking and customized reports to manage your revenue, categorize expenses, and find cost-cutting opportunities.

Get started with Quickbooks here

The new Accounting Software from FreshBooks helps photographers like you to spend less time on bookkeeping and more time capturing the perfect shot. Set aside some time each day or week to put down the lens and stay on top of your finances. By doing a bit of maintenance every day or every week, you will know your business more deeply and end-of-the-year tax time will be a breeze. Debits appear on the left side of your general ledger and must always be balanced by credits. Debits are great for increasing your assets and decreasing liabilities, but not so great when they increase your expenses and decrease your income.

It’s one that I am particularly impressed with as it is exclusive to the provider. With Netsuite, distance or location is not a barrier as you can easily access your financials from anywhere and on any device. Since it is a cloud-based software, you have access to your data anywhere you have access to internet connectivity. Regardless of the size of your accounting for photographers photography studio, you require accounting software for a number of reasons.

When setting up services, be sure to assign them to the correct income account, to accurately track them. Products can be linked to the appropriate expense account if you are tracking inventory and stocks as well. Now this plan is mostly serious for businesses who are just starting to get your feet wet or just starting out have a few expenses and are not making a lot of sales. With this you get the bare minimum of the software without the option of getting an Accountant or Bookkeeper to help you out. Starting at $34/month, or $400/annually, you can do a free 7-day trial of Honeybook to see if it fits your accounting needs. There’s no strings attached, try FreshBooks’ accounting software for your photography business, for free, for 30 days.

Get Started with Lifestyle Family Photography

This deduction can apply whether you’re a sole proprietor or have formed an LLC—what matters is proper documentation and exclusive business use of that space. Maintain separate records of these ongoing costs to simplify your bookkeeping. As with gear, only the portion used for business is deductible if you also use these tools personally.

This includes logging client payments, reconciling receipts, and categorizing bank transactions. Syncing your photography business bank accounts with QuickBooks Online can help you in a lot of ways. By linking your account, transactions automatically import into QuickBooks. That means you can track expenses, manage cash flow, and reconcile bank statements effortlessly. Quickbooks offers several paid tiers for business owners, starting at $10/month. Most business owners go for the self-employed option, especially if they’re a relatively small operation.