Well that was a bit rude. email saying sorry we dont want you anymore, fair enough, then closed my account instantly, so no idea how much they owned me, IF they are planning on paying out (email them to ask), or even if they have really removed all my images instantly from sale.

Anyone else?

has anyone tried buying one of your own images to see if you get the credits or royalty?

Hi
This is a discussion for more for UK based stock photographers, as its more about UK TAX and accounting.

Im interested in how other UK people organise and account for their stock earnings. No details, no personal info, just outline info. Disclaimer "Im not an accountant"

Heres mine, i'm not saying i'm right, it might help others, I'd love to know what you do.
The TAX office once told me that they wanted me to account for that overseas currency I earn (dollar, euro etc) actually WHEN I earn't it, and not when it arrived in my bank.
This is a very important point as exchange rates and transfer fees vary with time.

So I account for all stock earnings, monthly (not daily), split up by stock site.
This is also grouped by currency, ie all USD sites in one table, all Euro sites in another table etc.
Then I apply the exchange rate GBP to <whatever currency> to that table at the start of each month.
So, yes, I only use one variation in exchange rate per month.
This forms the basis of my earnings, for tax accounting purposes (self assessment)

Now, in reality, this isn't the same as my actual earnings.
In reality this is what happens.
The sites that payout every month, will be similar to what ive accounted for. Not exactly the same as exchange rates change hourly, and different organisations use slightly different rates (don't hold me to this).
Some low paying sites may not payout until for (lets just guess) 12 months.
So that money wont hit my PayPal account until long after i've accounted for it.
That also means the conversion rate (exchange rate) wont be the same as when i accounted for it originally.
But this is how the TAX man wanted me to account for these earnings, so ok, you will win some, you will lose some, as exchange rates go up and down.

Also Paypal (or whatever banking system you use) charges a 'fee' for the conversion.
That fee i haven't accounted for anywhere, and its something I think i need to account for, hence putting my ideas down here.
Paypal don't actually 'charge' a fee, but its hidden in the exchange rate. A bit sneaky I think?

For the type of businesses we are, its quite a complicated accounts process, and i've been doing this for many years.

Look forward to hearing your processes and experiences.

UPDATE
HMRC "Cash basis accounting" states quote "With cash basis, only record income you actually received in a tax year. Don�t count any money you�re owed but haven�t yet received." unquote
I was told (gov tax official) that because my stock earning, 'hit' my account, (albeit my account in an overseas stock library before i've been able to draw it down to PayPal or similar), then thats when i account for it.
It's a bit weird because I cant actually get the cash from those sites that don't allow you to draw down before you hit a certain minimum cash value.

 

Can you see current month daily sales? or just the previous month?

Did you know Fotolia allow buyers to make a derivative of your work you just sold to them? if you dont know what a derivative is...

What is a derivative work?
A derivative work is a work that is based on (derived from) another work; for example a painting based on a photograph, a collage, a musical work based on an existing piece or samples, a screenplay based on a book.

Personally i call that down right theft.

Hi
I bet we all battle with backups, are we doing enough, is it robust enough, is it costing too much? should i do more, etc. You can ALWAYS do more, but you gotta live life as well.

Well finally i have a system that works for me, here it is, whats your system?

macbook pro with 500Gb SSD
After a shoot i transfer the images to my mac, and dont delete the cards for a few days.
I run continuous cloud backup, so they start drip feeding to cloud storage straight away. I have about 35Mb download and 8mb upload speeds)
Ill run a local data (my profile) backup twice (ie once a week, or more frequent if needed), on two separate portable hard drives, so they are a copy of each other (to all intense purposes)
I also run timemachine on a 3rd drive once a month.

When i need space on my mac i delete older shoots, knowing they are stored in three places.
When the portable drives get full, ill park those and get two more and start again.

I've never lost images, but i feel i am as robust as i need to be.

Additionally i have a 256Gb storage card in the side of my mac, great additional (always with me) storage and it doesnt stick out.

SS earning 10th June not updated yet, has no download number. even if you got a zero it usually shows very quickly after that day. nothing yet.6pm GMT, hows yours?

Hi
I got updated the statistics a month ago, but for the life of me i cant remember how lol
Anyone help
thanks

no reply from SS for credentials approval for 6 days.

Anyone else getting this issue.

Editorial need to be put up ASAP, 6 days is tooooo long to wait.

Hi
Ive uploaded the creds, ive read the new editorial info, BS have even emailed me the info on how to upload and attached credts to images, but i still cant attach the creds to the images.

Their quote
"After you upload the credentials, you will be able to link them to images before you submit for review. An additional area for uploaded credentials will appear under the Model/Property Release tab for each image."

This just doesnt appear. Anyone else got it working?

Whos looked at their PDF statements for January?

Most of mine say Exclusive sales, when i have no exclusive images there.
The sales dates are not in order.
The layout couldn't be worse.

Tried the txt download statement? good luck with the headache inducing pages

And what about the actual royalities webpage statement, all pretty graphs and all that, but give me a simple table like SS.

It doesnt even give you an actual monthly sales figure, you either need to guess from a graph, or add up all the bars on the graph, manually.

Is this really how its going to be? does anyone like it?

Hi

Has anyone looked at the customer search activity on Alamy?
Try not using a search term, just all sales for last month, sort by sales.

It looks like the most selling image search term last month sold 11 times, and thats for all contributors

is that really right

Hi

Ive read a lot on here about fotolia and adobe stock, but (ok i know im late), i still cant tell if my port automatically gets added on Adobe stock or not.

Does it make a difference on the setting on Fotolia for DPC, which ive just switched on ON?

I did a search on AS but so far cant find any
thanks if you know anything

simon