“I can’t wait to start tracking all of my expenses and analyzing them,” said no photographer ever. Yet many creatives are stressed and worried about money. One of the best ways to lay that stress aside for yourself is to honestly understand your finances inside and out…and that includes tracking your photography expenses!

What Are Photography Expenses?

Simply put, tracking your expenses for your business is creating a record of everything you buy for your business. Some popular expenses include:

• Studio rent
• Education, conferences, classes, online learning subscriptions
• Advertising, online listings, social media ads
• Paying your assistant or second photographer at events
• Website hosting
• Cameras, lenses, lighting equipment
• Studio utilities
• Software licenses
• Travel for business
• Legal fees, accounting fees
• Insurance
• Postage and shipping
• Album expenses

Those are great and all, but a huge list can be super overwhelming in the early days of your expense tracking journey. So where do you really begin?

[Read: How to Manage Money for Photo Business Longevity]

Distinguish What Is and Isn’t a Photography Expense For Your Business

When I got started with photography I constantly thought “Is this an expense?” every time I wrote a check or pulled out my card. So, I started with the basics and came up with three major questions to answer every time I logged an expense:

1. Do I need this to operate my photography business? These are expenses that happen every year regardless of how many clients I book!
2. Do I need this to get more business?
3. Do I need this to produce a product or service for my clients? These are variable, only existing when I have clients to serve.

This helped me start coming up with expense categories. 

[Read: The 4 P’s of Passive Income for Any Photographer]

For example, what expenses are entailed in a basic time-and-files-only wedding coverage?  These expenses can include all of my camera and lighting gear, my assistant’s fee, a second photographer’s fee (if I have one), our parking for the wedding day or Uber rides, meals and food for the day, the software subscription to cull my images, the software subscription to do any edits, the cost of outsourced post-production, the cost to host the online gallery that I use to deliver the images to my clients, and so on and so forth.

Key Steps to Tracking Your Photography Expenses

Once you’re ready and made your own lists and categories, it’s time to track. How exactly you track your expenses isn’t as important as actually tracking them.

Whether you choose to use QuickBooks, Táve, Expensify, Quicken or another studio management software—or even a simple spreadsheet—just start somewhere. A lot of people get hung up on finding the exact right program for them when just opening up Excel or Numbers is a perfectly good way to begin.

Here’s what I did:

1. I started with a spreadsheet in the early days of my photography business to start getting an idea of what I was spending and where.
2. I then consulted with an accountant to make sure I was doing it correctly. I implore you to not skip this step; an accountant is crucial to make sure that you’re doing things correctly per the requirements of your country, city, state, etc. My accountant also helps me analyze my expenses and helps me prepare my taxes each year.
3. I use QuickBooks for all my accounting and expense tracking. QuickBooks allows me to import transactions from my debit cards as well as my credit cards and reconcile them with my bank statements. This is super helpful because I’m terrible about recording receipts! I sit with my QuickBooks account once a quarter to reconcile everything, look through my expenses, see how much I’m spending, and make sure it’s all in line with my budgets.

[Read: Must-Know Tax Tips for Photographers in 2022—Your Questions Answered]

Why Is It So Important to Track Expenses For Your Business?

This might seem fussy, time-consuming and just another menial business task you’d love to skip. Don’t! 

Having an eye on the big financial picture of money coming in and going out in your business will let you know:

1. where you’re profitable
2. what money spent actually brings you new clients
3. the data you need to craft the financial future of your business

Good luck, and happy tracking!

Susan Stripling is a wedding and portrait photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds the prestigious Grand Master title at WPPI, where she shared her tips with attendees this year on managing money.