Financial reports for a wedding film business

The finance page: your year at a glance

Click Finance and four numbers sit across the top: net profit against last year, what you have collected, what clients still owe, and what is late. Under them, a bar chart sets earnings against expenses for every month, and a short list shows who pays next, late ones first.

Expenses go in from the same page: a description, an amount, a category such as gear, travel or a subcontractor, and the wedding it belongs to if it belongs to one. Repeating ones count toward your monthly burn. The finance and sales tax page goes through each part.

Eight financial reports for small business, built from your records

Instead of a small business financial report template you fill in by hand, these read the money already in your studio. Nothing is typed in, and every report but the Outlook exports to CSV for your accountant.

• Outlook: what lands in the next 90 days, contracted work not yet invoiced, and your monthly burn.
• Profit and loss: money in, money out and what you kept, by month, quarter or year.
• Aging: every unpaid balance by client and how late it is.
• Sales tax: what you billed and what you collected in a filing window, counted on a cash basis and an accrual basis.
• Weddings: what each wedding netted after the expenses you tied to it, with its margin.
• Lead sources: where inquiries come from, which ones book and what they are worth.
• Pipeline: deals at each stage and their contracted value.
• Production: how fast films go out against the delivery turnaround you promise.

Goals, momentum and the hours behind each film

Reports look back. Goals look ahead: what you want to collect, how many weddings you want to book and how fast you deliver, each measured against where you should be today. On the dashboard, Momentum turns revenue, leads, posting and pipeline into one number that says whether the business is speeding up. Goals and Momentum has the detail.

The last piece is time. A small menu bar timer counts the hours you spend in your editor, and Hailo sets each film's booked value against them, so wedding videographer income stops being a single yearly figure and becomes what each film paid per hour. See editing time tracking.

What Hailo is not

Hailo is not accounting software and does not do your bookkeeping. If you searched for bookkeeping for photographers or accounting software for photographers, keep whatever your accountant uses: QuickBooks is not connected yet, so Hailo hands over CSV files instead. Income earned outside Hailo can come in from a CSV too, as long as it is not client payments, which Hailo already counts from your invoices.

Outside the United States the money is right, but the tax report is still headed Sales tax rather than VAT or GST.