Free tool
Proofing Time Drain Calculator
See how many hours a month disappear into favorites collected by email and into orders that had to be rebuilt because a file name was wrong.
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Print Order Profit Calculator
Enter your session count, your average print order and what the lab keeps, and see what actually lands in the studio account each month.
Retail price minus lab cost is not profit. A 20x30 wall portrait carries the print, the mount, the frame, the box, the shipping, the card processing fee and the retouching hours you rarely bill separately. Solo studios routinely discover that a healthy sounding average order leaves less than expected once all of that is subtracted.
This calculator uses one order as the unit, because that is how a portrait studio earns. Set your own numbers, then look at the profit per order figure and ask whether it justifies the hours between the shoot and the framed print landing on a client wall.
Your result
Print orders per month
4.4
Galleries that convert into a paid print order each month.
Monthly print revenue
$1,848
Retail print sales before any costs are removed.
Profit per print order
$260
What one order leaves after the lab, the card fee and retouching.
Monthly print profit
$1,145
Print profit before studio rent, gear and your session fee.
These figures cover print sales only, so add your session fees separately when you review your price list.
Why the profit per order number matters most
Monthly totals hide weak pricing. A studio can push revenue up by shooting more sessions while every individual order barely clears the lab bill, and the exhaustion arrives long before the bank balance does. Profit per order tells you whether the sale itself works.
A useful test: compare profit per order against the hours between the shoot and delivery, including culling, gallery building, the ordering conversation, retouching, the lab order and the box inspection. If that hourly figure is below what you would accept from any other client work, the retail list needs raising, not the session count.
Where solo studios usually set the inputs wrong
Two inputs are consistently optimistic. The first is the share of sessions that order prints, which photographers estimate from memory and typically overstate. Count real orders from the last six months instead. The second is retouching cost, which gets entered as zero because it is your own time.
The lab share is the one most worth checking against a current invoice. Framing, mounting and box costs drift upward quietly, and a price list built three seasons ago on old numbers is the single most common reason a busy portrait studio still feels tight in December.
Questions about this calculator
Should sales tax be included in the average order?
No, enter the retail total before tax. Tax you collect is not revenue, it is money you remit to the state, and states classify portrait sessions and prints differently. Keeping it out of this calculation keeps the profit figure honest.
What is a reasonable order rate for portrait work?
It varies with how you sell. Studios that hold an ordering conversation and show wall sizes tend to convert a good deal more of their galleries than studios that email a link and wait. Use your own trailing six months rather than any published benchmark.
Does this include my session fee?
No, this covers print sales only. Session fees usually cover the shoot itself and your studio overhead, and mixing them together hides whether the print sale is carrying its own weight. Run this first, then add the session fee to see the full picture.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The Gallery to Print Delivery Checklist
Every step a solo portrait studio should hit between the pre session conversation and the framed print reaching a client wall.
Run one real session through the gallery
The figure above came from your sessions, your lab and your average print order, not from our defaults. In a demo we take one of those sessions, build the proof gallery, mark favorites the way a parent would on a phone in a parking lot, and produce the order sheet your lab would receive. Then you can see whether the number on this page actually moves.