Free Photography Business Spreadsheet

Most photographers run their books out of a bank app and a bad feeling. That works right up until the first quarter you owe estimated taxes, or the first time an insurance claim asks for a serial number, or the first client who quietly never paid an invoice from four months ago.

This workbook is the boring infrastructure that fixes all three. It isn't clever and it doesn't try to be — it's a set of correctly structured tabs with the right columns already in place, so you can start recording things today instead of spending a Sunday building a spreadsheet from scratch.

What's in the workbook

• A dashboard that actually works — Gross revenue, expenses, net profit, outstanding invoices, business miles, mileage deduction and tax set-aside — all calculated from what you enter. Nothing to wire up.
• Two tabs that drive everything — Income for every payment in, Expenses for every cost out, with a category dropdown so your reporting stays consistent. Keep those two current and the rest looks after itself.
• Invoices and clients — Mark an invoice unpaid and it appears on the dashboard as money owed. Client lifetime value totals itself from your income rows.
• Mileage — Type two odometer readings; miles and the deduction calculate. The rate is a cell you control, because the IRS changes it — twice in 2026 alone.
• Gear — Equipment Inventory with serial numbers, purchase date, cost, replacement value and warranty, plus a Maintenance Log. The tab that pays for itself the day something gets stolen.
• Tax — Quarterly Taxes, Sales Tax, Home Office apportionment and a 12-point Audit Checklist of the paperwork you want to already have.
• Growth — Marketing ROI by campaign, stock royalties, preset and LUT sales, content revenue and a book project budget.

How to use it

1. Open it in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets — it's a standard .xlsx, so all three handle it. Read Me is the second tab and explains the whole thing in about a minute.
2. Use two tabs only at first: Income and Expenses. Everything on the dashboard comes from those. Trying to fill all twenty-five in week one is how spreadsheets get abandoned.
3. Put your tax rate in the yellow cell on the dashboard once your accountant gives you one. It's deliberately blank — what you owe depends on your entity type, your state and self-employment tax, and a spreadsheet shouldn't guess at that.
4. Fill in Equipment Inventory once, properly, with serial numbers. It takes an afternoon and it's the most valuable tab in the file if you're ever burgled or make a claim.
5. Put fifteen minutes in your calendar every Friday to enter the week. Bookkeeping is only painful when it's eleven months of it at once.

Questions

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