Paying second shooters and editors on time

"Editor not paid yet" is a specific kind of note. It's not vague — the photographer who wrote it knows exactly what they mean and exactly what needs to happen next. The trouble is where it lives: in a notes column, next to twenty other lines like it, with no date attached and no way to find it again except by scrolling past every other booking.

Second shooters and editors are usually paid per job, not on a schedule, which means the only trigger for actually paying them is someone remembering to. A booking sheet that tracks status — inquiry, confirmed, shot, delivered — has no natural place for "and by the way, still owe Nav for Saturday." So it goes in notes, or a separate list, or nowhere, until the team member asks.

Assignments, not just names

On Shootlog, team members aren't typed into a text field — they're picked from a team list and assigned to a specific day of a specific booking, with their own hours and their own pay attached to that assignment. A second shooter working the Mehndi and the Reception on the same booking gets two assignments, not one line trying to cover both. Each assignment can be marked paid with one tap, and the ones that aren't show up as owed — on that booking, and rolled up across every booking a team member has worked.

That rollup is the part a notes column can't do. "What do I owe Nav, across everything, right now" is a question a photographer with a team asks regularly, and answering it by searching notes for a name gets slower as the season goes on. Shootlog keeps it as a running total instead of a search.

Editors work differently, and get their own tracking

An editor isn't shoot-day team — there's no date they show up, no hours to log. What they have is a stage: not started, with the editor, back for review, delivered. Photo and video get their own tracks on every booking, because a wedding often has both moving at different speeds. Assign an editor, set a due date, and an overdue edit shows up on the dashboard on its own, rather than as a note that only gets read when someone goes looking for it.

Editor pay is logged as a cost against the booking, the same way any other expense is, so it counts toward what the booking actually made and toward what's still owed to suppliers — a second running total, separate from team pay, because the two are usually paid from different places on different timelines.

One tap instead of one long scroll

None of this is complicated to set up — a team list of names, assignments made when a booking is confirmed, costs logged as they come in. What it changes is what happens after: instead of a note that says someone hasn't been paid, there's a number that says exactly who, how much, and for what, visible without scrolling past everything else on the board. Paying people on time stops depending on a photographer's memory of what they scribbled in a notes cell three weeks ago.

It matters most when you have a team, not just yourself

A solo photographer doesn't need any of this — there's no one else to pay, so a booking's cost is whatever the editor charges, if anyone. The moment a studio brings on a second shooter, or works with more than one editor, the maths gets harder to hold in your head. Two team members on the same wedding, at different rates, for different hours, on different days, is exactly the kind of detail a notes field was never built to keep straight. Assignments keep it straight by construction: each one is its own record, with its own hours, its own pay and its own paid-or-not status, so nothing has to be reconstructed from memory when someone asks what they're owed.

The goal isn't to add process for its own sake. It's that a team member who worked a long Saturday and hasn't been paid three weeks later isn't a management problem — it's usually just a note that got buried under twenty other notes. Giving pay its own place, attached to the exact day it was earned on, is a small change that removes most of the reason that happens at all.