Invoice Breakdown #6
Hello Weekend Club Members!
Welcome to the sixth invoice breakdown post! In this series I'm going to share some of our invoices and break them down for you. I was inspired to do this because of this site which I've found to be super helpful.
A couple of reminders:
This is solely for the purpose of educating, not for bragging or for making anyone feel bad about their rates. This is partly why I want to share some of our old invoices so that you can all see how much we've grown - and know that you can do this too!
These are meant to be examples and not specific financial advice. We don't know the ins and outs of your business, process, or the projects you take on. We can't give super specific advice because every job and client will be so different. We encourage you to take all of these posts with a grain of salt and then apply them to your own business and shoots however makes sense for you.
I'm also not going to share any names since I want to protect our client's information but I'll do my best to describe the project as best I can in order to give you some context.
As much as we talk about pricing your worth, I always still feel self-conscious about our own prices and it's scary to put them out there for other people to see. I'm doing it because I love you guys so BE NICE OK?
If you have any questions about the specifics of any of the invoices that I share, feel free to reach out to me and ask questions in the Slack channel or comment on the post so that everyone else can see and learn too!
For this post I thought it would be fun to go back to the very first invoice we sent through Quickbooks which was back in December of 2018. Up until that point we had been sending all invoices as a PDF through email. Using Quickbooks really started to help us keep better track of our cashflow and ensure that we were sending out reminders and late fees.
This invoice was for a brand that we had been shooting with for a while, a larger brand that is sold in Sephora. To be honest, they were a difficult client who always wanted to cut costs as much as possible and I believe we only did one more shoot with them after this. Definitely for the best because I looked back through some emails as I wrote this post and it made me stressed remembering the lack of organization and how rude they could be at times.
88 STYLED PRODUCT IMAGES
Photography..................$6,600
At this time, we were charging per photo and we had increased our rate with this company to $75/photo. I believe it was $60 or $50 before, I can't remember exactly but either way it was much too low. When I told the client about the increased cost, here was their response:
"This issue on pricing is that most of these are lifestyle and social photos. It is a bit steep for this type of content. We can identify the photos that need to be product page shots or for Sephora's pages that need much high quality that requires must more post-production work."
I think we must have continued the conversation over the phone because I didn't respond to that and they ended up paying the $75/image but reading that response again made me so irritated. First of all, just because some of the images are not being used in Sephora doesn't mean they aren't valuable or don't take time. Social Media is also a form of advertising and I know for a fact that they used a lot of the images in ads. I also know that a lot of these images were used in articles for big name websites because I can still see them on Pixsy.
This is why licensing is so important. Charging for the time (photography, post, pre-production ect) and then for the value (licensing) allows you to better justify your rates. It allows the client to only pay for what they actually need and for you to charge the appropriate amount for how much the images are used.
I looked it up in Fotoquote and for the amount that these images were used - I chose the All Marketing Material Pack which includes in-store display, newsletters, promotional website, promotional email, postcards, press - we should have been paid $11,244 for 1 year of international usage per image. This doesn't even include social media usage or ads.
If I was pricing out this shoot now and they wanted all of that usage for every image I would probably just include social media usage and ads. If they wanted to have that much for all 88 images I would give them a bulk discount and drop it down to $6,840 per image. If they chose to move forward with that much usage it would cost them $601,920 total for usage alone. Now will most companies pay that? Probably not. That's why I encourage clients to pay for just their web and organic social media usage and pay per image for whatever else they need. This allows us to be fairly compensated and still take on clients who don't have half a million to spend.
If we had charged appropriately for usage alone we would have made significantly more from this shoot and would be continuing to make money to this day - I know they still use the images.
At this time we were only charging for the actual photography, in addition to usage we didn't consider the post production, pre-production, art direction, prop sourcing and styling, etc. This was a 2 day shoot so now this is what we would charge for just photography alone. Kind of crazy to think about how much money we missed out on.
Studio Rental..................$1,179
This was the charge for renting a studio in our area for 2 days - we didn't have our own studio at this point so we passed on the full cost to the client.
Props..................$125.49
I remember that we brought some props and the client brought others because they wanted to control the cost. If you listen to Per Our Last Email, this is the client we've mentioned who brought 2 ugly apples and expected us to create tons of different images with them (LOL). This was such a low rate for the amount of images we created.
Total - $7,904.49
There's our latest invoice breakdown! I hope that this encourages you to charge your worth. I would love to hear your thoughts on this, if it's helpful or if you have any questions! Also feel free to let me know if you would have priced things differently - I always love hearing how other price things.
Is it the weekend yet?
Elle