I use a combination of both (I have about 100 images on average on sites) and I use a spreadsheet just to keep track of everything (a summary mainly) but I use the sites to look at daily statistics.

i log into all the sites each morning and update a fairly detail spreadsheet in excel.

For each site I keep track of
earnings/day, 14 day avg earnings, $PPPY 30 day average, $PPPY yearly average, images online

Total average for all those items over all the sites
monthly earnings for each site
earnings per day of the week


i think that is most of it.  it doens't take too much time once the spreadsheet is made.. it is also nice to see graphs of averages going up down, and comparison graphs to last year and such.

per picture per year or to that effect.

Leaf - what if you are away for a week?
I do mine on a monthly basis but try to update it daily (most sites give stats per calander month if you get behind).

Geopappas - how are you doing it at the moment?

Wouldn't it be great it istocks image manager (or similar) worked for all sites.

Leaf - what if you are away for a week?

for sites like shutterstock it is no problem, i just look at how much I made each day and update the graph
for sites like dreamstime, I sometimes go and look at the downloads and add up each individual download for each day, and type it in, or else I just guess the approx amount for each day and make sure it adds up in the end.

Geopappas - how are you doing it at the moment?

I am currently using an MS Excel spreadsheet to enter per photo sales.  I then calculate things such as monthly sales per agency, total sales per agency, and predicted sales for the current month (based on current earnings and pro-rating it).

But I am currently moving all of this to an Oracle database.  I am an Oracle DBA by profession and it will be almost as easy, and provide me with a lot more options for reports (such as per picture sales).

The biggest problem I see is for data entry when I start to have LOTS of sales per day.  But when that time comes, I will probably create an interface that will make photo entry as simple as possible.

It's fun to look at figures and charts. But when there are too much stuff to monitor, some thing have to go and thus now I just monitor per day sales.

I only track monthly sales for each site.  I only have a few hundred images, but I can't imagine it being worth the time to track every sales on every site.  Will having all that information really have a significant impact on your shooting and uploading?

Mark

I use an excel spreedsheet.  I use to track money made "by image" and "by month per site"  The "by image" got too labor intensive (espeically when it's not a simple price per sale x number of sales)

So, I gave up and track monthly totals ($ and #) per site.  Anthing else needs daily upkeep.