As the companies finance officer it was my job to look at the specifics of what we would have to pay and how much we would need to be getting in a year to cover our costs and be able to pay ourselves a way to live on. This task was done in a group with myself, Emma and Lauren as it meant that we could discuss the different costs and come to an agreement about what kinds of things would be essential and thus need to be included in our plan. We planned our finances using a spreadsheet and divided our costs into four main categories; required costs, optional costs, tax expenses and optional equipment. Required costs were costs that we had to pay if we were starting a company from scratch, so, business insurance, licenses for software, rent and a license to hold the personal data of clients would come under this for example. Normally, if we were renting out a different studio we could have specific extra costs in the form of bills such as, electricity, water and insurance on top of that. However, because we're renting a studio in Duke Studios these costs aren't factors we have to consider. As far as a licence to 'Creative Cloud' goes I believe a license covers you on up to two computers and as there is four of us we got two of those. Aside from other licenses and the cost of insurance we decided to pay ourselves a salary based on our current outgoings and costs, at around £8,000 a year. This is our biggest outgoing cost at £32,000. Optional costs cover things such as paying for our website's domain name and extra software licenses such as a Maya license. Trying to factor in things like this were more difficult because Maya actually has a pay as you go function on their license so it would be totally dependent on if we were doing work that required 3D software to see if we needed to pay for it. Finally we decided to add an additional cost as if we were starting the whole company from scratch with no computers, tablets or drawing tools and this would add up to around £9,000. However, because we all have our own computers and enough equipment to manage with, this is only a hypothetical cost and would actually be much less than this.
With all of the costs we could think of that needed to be factored in taken into consideration and with an added tax of 20% it would mean that the total cost of keeping the studio running and allocating ourselves a base salary of £8000, it would cost £44,053.68. It's difficult to imagine how much different jobs would pay, I was trying to imagine how much work we would have to do in a year to make this much money. It's difficult to know also whether to charge by hour or a set amount for a particular project. If we were working 50 hours a week each for a total of 200 hours a week across say 45 weeks it would mean we had collectively worked 9000 hours. If we worked hourly it would amount to around £4.88 an hour, so perhaps the cost of charging someone for a particular job or project would be more than I initially thought. Alternatively we could work fewer weeks or fewer hours per week and it would balance out in a similar way.
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