Free tool
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.
Free tool, no sign up
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.
The cost of a loose proofing process is never a single visible bill. It is six minutes here, a re-read of a message thread there, a call to the lab because the mother meant the frame with the dog rather than the one with the same file name ending. Individually forgettable, collectively a working week per season.
This calculator turns those minutes into hours. Enter how many sessions you run, how much back and forth a typical gallery generates, and how often a file name mix up sends you back to fix an order. The annual figure is usually the one that changes minds.
Your result
Monthly hours chasing favorites
7.2
Time spent collecting and interpreting favorites by message.
Monthly hours fixing mix ups
1.5
Time spent correcting orders built from the wrong file.
Admin hours per session
1.1
Proofing admin carried by each session you shoot.
Hours lost per year
104
A full year of proofing admin, before any shooting or editing.
Compare the annual hours against the sessions you could shoot in that time to see what the loose process really costs.
Senior season is where these hours actually hurt
Spread across a quiet spring, an extra hour of proofing admin per session is invisible. Compressed into eight weeks of seniors and holiday family sessions, the same hour per session is the difference between delivering on time and telling three families their prints will not arrive before the holidays.
Look at the admin hours per session figure and multiply it by your heaviest month, not your average one. That is the number that decides whether your busy season is profitable or simply busy.
What actually removes the hours
Two changes do most of the work. First, favorites marked in the gallery rather than typed into an email, so the client is choosing from images instead of describing them. Second, an order sheet built from those marked favorites, so no one retypes a file name between the client, you and the lab.
Everything else is smaller. A deadline on the gallery helps, and a cap on how many favorites a family can mark helps more than photographers expect, because an undecided client generates far more messages than a decisive one.
Questions about this calculator
Are nine messages per session realistic?
For an emailed proof list it is a common count once you include the first send, the questions, the changed selections and the size discussion. Studios that sell wall portraits usually run higher, because size and crop questions add their own thread. Count one real recent session before you trust the default.
Should I count time spent on the ordering call?
No, keep the ordering conversation out of it. That call is sales work and it earns its keep. This calculator is measuring the administrative residue around it, which is the part that produces no revenue at all.
How do I check the mix up input honestly?
Search your email for the last six months of messages to your lab about a corrected or replaced order. Most solo studios find one or two a month during busy season and forget them by the next week. Reprints and rush shipping make each one more expensive than the minutes suggest.
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.