I have been submitting to microstock agencies for over a year and as yet I have not kept any records.

2008 marks the year that I get serious with my photography, stock in particular and I wish to keep accurate records both for me and the tax man.

Can anyone point me in the right direction as to the best way to do this. I would like it to be software based and be able to track progress for individual agencies and again for all agencies together. I understand that Excel is the way to go, but where do you start?

Any info would be very much appreciated as I'm a bit clueless when it comes to this type of thing. Thanks.

Same here.  I wrote a spreadsheet in excel...
I have a master list that has every file I upload.. it columns out for every site that I am on.  It tracks the name of the photo on that site, when I uploaded it and that site's file number on it...  it also tracks total quantitiy of how many times it has sold on each site.  I also use a color coding for quick reference on every pix sold... also what pix may be exclusive to some sites.
   It also gives me directory information on what hard drive (I'm currently using 6 of them), prime directory and sub-directories where that pic is located for easy access and...  gives me file size data. 
    I also have worksheets pushed out from the master on every individual site.. listing each pic sold, date sold and  $$ sold for... those worksheets calc out the total sales per pic and total per site..  it also tracks payouts for me and gives me a running total for all business I ever had with each site....
    In the case of Fotolia.... it also lists who the buyer was.. name and email or website for each pic sold.

    It also tracks rejections and the reason why..   all of this is done on one spreadsheet...  with the click of a mouse, I know everything that has transpired with every photo I own/sell.

However.... now that I'm approaching  1K  pictures out there... it's getting kind of bulky...   I suppose I can do a few modifications and throw in a couple macros and speed the thing up..

or................   I might just spring for something like  Lightroom....  but I don't want to invest in that (or anything else) until I get some good first-hand positive reccomendations on it.     =tom


....or maybe I should get into the spreadsheet business.... 

wow, you do ALL THAT for 1000 images.  wow.

I just keep track of my daily earnings for each site i submit to, then out of that calculate (automatically with excel) $/p/year for each site, 14 day and 30 day daily sale avg for all sites.

LOL.... sounds worse than it is...   the program does the bulk of the work.. my entire effort only takes about 15 mins a day...  The big task was designing and writing the spreadsheet.   =tom

I've been using Lightroom for several months now and I think I've finally come up with something that works for me.  Firstly, I do not track stats in general.  I let the various agencies do that for me.  Under every directory on my various hard drives (3 right now), I have thre folders. One for midstock, one for micro and one for images that have not yet been submitted anywhere. 

I first submit to midstock and I mark in the workflow section in the metadata which agencies I've submitted to.  For instance, I would use ALS or PSCS for something submitted to Alamy or PSC.  If the image gets accepted, I change the "S" to an "A" or "R" if the image is rejected.  In the "Rights" area in the metadata I add either RM or RF so I don't make the mistake of submitting something as RF at one agency and RM at another.  Anything rejected by all midstock agencies will then get submitted to micro and moved over to that folder. 

I don't keep track of which micro agencies accept/reject the image because there are too many and it's too big of a hassle for the amount of money micro pays.

My method is always evolving.  I too started with Excel, but quickly outgrew it.  I found it tedious to keep up with.  Lightroom is definitely not the perfect solution, but I don't want to buy and learn more new software.

So if you can get a free website where you can add your microstock stats in it and compare it with your old stats and with stats from other users? Do you wanna use something like this often?