Keeping track of your jobs & payments

As you start doing more paid voiceover work, it’ll become increasingly important to keep track of your jobs, including whether or not you’ve been paid and how much.

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reasons to track your VO jobs

  • It helps you keep track of missing and late payments. This is perhaps the most important reason to start tracking your jobs if you’re not already! The unfortunate reality is it’s not actually that uncommon for clients to forget to pay an invoice, for a check to get lost in the mail, or even mistakenly paid to the wrong account or actor! It’s also unfortunately common for clients to lag behind months on payments. By tracking your session dates, you can easily pull up data for when you worked and how much you’re owed (as clients do not always keep these records) and can help in the case of any payment discrepancies.
  • It helps you remember what projects you worked on and what roles you played. Many larger game projects for example do not tell the voice actors when the project is released, so voice actors have to keep tabs on it independently to know when they’ll be allowed to announce their role(s). On short one-off projects, it can be easy to forget who you played, especially if you voiced multiple characters.
  • It helps you keep track of clients/studios you worked with. Whether you want to reach out later, or need to follow up on payments or tax forms, it can help to have a list of everyone you’ve worked with that year.
  • Proper bookkeeping can help with taxes. For US-based actors who are required to independently report their freelance income, not all clients will send you a 1099, but you will still be responsible to account for it. A spreadsheet showing which clients paid you that year and what amount can not only help you with tax reporting, but also to reconcile any 1099s you did or didn’t receive. It can even help you track potentially deductible expenses like agent commissions or PayPal fees.
  • It helps you identify trends in your income. On Google Sheets for example, you can use the data to create various types of graphs, such as a pie chart showing you which percentage of your income comes from various genres of work, or a line chart showing how your earnings fluctuate from month to month and which months tend to be slower or busier overall.

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information to consider including

  • Session/record date (your jobs should be listed chronologically by date – separate by month if desired)
  • Client/studio name (however you identify the company or person responsible for paying you)
  • Title of project
  • Role(s) played
  • Category of work (organize these in a way that most makes sense to you for identifying trends in your income – example categories include game, dubbing, animation, commercial, narration, & indie; VO-adjacent income such as directing, streaming or conventions can also be categorized here)
  • Total amount owed
  • (Optional) Deductions – if you regularly have amounts deducted from your paycheck such as agent commissions or PayPal/bank wire fees, it’s worth creating an extra column for them. In this case you will have three payment columns total: gross pay, deduction, and net pay. You may wish to set up a spreadsheet formula that will automatically calculate your net amount once you enter both the gross amount and deduction.
  • Payment status (You’ll need some way to mark off whether a job has been paid. One suggested way to do it is to highlight the row in a color of your choice once the job has been paid, and/or create a column where you can mark off once the payment has been completed. You can set up a formula to automatically color in the row once you mark payment complete.)
  • Notes (There are many reasons you may wish to note down something or other about the job, such as when you followed up on payment or the fact that it was a pickup session or usage fee, etc.)

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(basic) sample Google Sheets template

Here is a very bare-bones example you can use to create your job tracking template.
(Please do not request editing access to this document as it would change the template for everyone! You can go to File–>Make A Copy to use and modify it for yourself, or File–>Download to save as an editable Excel sheet.)

If you’re good with formulas, you can automate things for yourself and make job tracking even easier—for example, by setting up the sheet to auto color-code whenever a job is marked off as paid, or creating a column that automatically totals up your income per month or deducts agency commissions.

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This article is written by Kira Buckland. While all guides and resources on this site are provided on a volunteer basis, you may optionally support with a coffee if you found them helpful!