Track Book Money Without the Year-End Scramble
Most authors run their book finances on receipts, memory, and an end-of-year scramble. It works until it doesn’t — usually right when SARS, a publisher statement, or a bookshop reconciliation needs to make sense.
Author finances aren’t complicated, but they are different from regular personal or business finances. Books move across multiple channels at different prices, with different splits, on different payment timelines. Stock sits in multiple locations. Royalties arrive in batches, sometimes months after the sale. Without a structured way to track all of this, the picture is always blurry.
A good author finance system tracks:
Sales by channel. Direct, online, consignment, distributor, publisher royalty. Each one with its own price and split.
Inventory across locations. What’s at home, what’s at the printer, what’s at each consignment partner. Stock that disappears from your tracking is stock that disappears from your income.
Outstanding payments. Which bookshop owes what, and from when. Most consignment payments are not late because of bad faith — they’re late because no one is tracking them. Your tracker is the polite reminder.
Royalty statements against your own records. Publisher statements should match your tracker. When they don’t, your tracker is your evidence.
SARS-relevant categorisation. Income, expenses, vehicle costs, home office, professional fees — categorised in a way your accountant can use without a translation step.
The hardest part is starting. Once a system is in place, the upkeep is twenty minutes a week. The benefit is everything else: clean SARS submissions, painless reconciliations, and the ongoing ability to know — actually know — what your book is doing.
Find this resource in the library
Tier: The Collective
What’s in the full resource: Complete spreadsheet for sales and inventory across all channels, invoicing and royalty tracking with running totals, a consignment ledger by partner, and SA tax-relevant categorisation ready for accountants and SARS.
Access: The Author Finance Spreadsheet Template is available to all Collective members.
