While not intended to replace traditional accounting methods, the Author Income and Expense Tracker is a quick and easy way for authors to track the profitability of each title, each series, or their writing career overall.
Knowing which titles and series are making money helps us build a strategy to market both new releases and our backlist.
By entering our income and expense transactions and tagging respective titles, we can view profit and loss by series specifically, by year, and by month. Pro members of Airtable have access to a variety of charts and graphs that allow us to view income and expenses by specific category, series, or title, and more fully understand the financial picture of our business.
In the All Transactions by Series view, we’ll enter either an income or an expense as our record and give it a descriptive name. From there we’ll select the respective series, tag the transaction with a title, and assign a category based on what the transaction is related to. 
The base will automatically group our records by series, then by title, and then by the transaction category. This view gives us the overall financial picture by year or series of years.
In the profit and loss by a series view, the groupings are similar but more specified. Likewise, the Series by Year view allows us to view a single series’ profitability through the use of filtering.
The final views are data entry separated by income and expense to make entering both more streamlined.
The purpose of this base is to allow for a quick analysis of which series—or even pen name—is most profitable.
The pro version of Airtable gives us the use of apps—charts and graphs specifically, which allow us to visualize and understand the profitability of our books in several different ways.
As always, if you have questions, please reach out to us via our website. Also, check out our social media and sign up for our newsletter. Keep on the lookout for future blog posts here.
Have a good one—and get writing!
Frank
Organized Authors
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