Running a Creative Studio by the Numbers: Gear Depreciation, Buy vs Rent, Team Utilisation & Project Margins

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Depreciate six pieces of studio gear, find each item's book value at the report date without dropping below its residual value, and work out how much the studio must put aside every month to replace its kit.
• Compare owning and renting five pieces of gear: the yearly cost of ownership after resale, the break-even number of days, a Buy/Rent decision per item and the cost of renting everything.
• Add up the yearly cost of owning a camera package, estimate how many days it is billed, set a day fee with a target margin and compare it with the rental-house price.
• Turn each person's salary cost and billable target into billable hours, spread the studio's overheads over those hours, calculate a fully loaded cost per billable hour and set a charge-out rate with a target margin.
• Turn a booking list into a person-by-week grid with SUMIFS, divide by each person's weekly billable capacity, flag overbooked weeks and measure the whole team's load.
• Total the hours and the cost of three fixed-fee projects from a timesheet, find the margin of each and the hourly rate the studio really earned – and discover which project lost money.
• Analyse six months of a monthly retainer: overage and unused hours, each month's invoice, the effective rate the studio earned per hour and the retainer's margin at loaded cost.
• Turn six months of revenue and costs into gross margin %, the monthly revenue Tidewater needs to break even, April's margin of safety and a chart of revenue against direct costs.