Business Description

Madelyn Wayment Photography is a small photography business that provides portraits, bridals, wedding, newborn, and family photos. It has a small clientele base and markets mostly through word-of-mouth and online advertising. The business does around 50 photography sessions a year. Editing is done in-house and blogs and Smugmug (a subscription based photo sharing website) are used as online portals for clients.

Problem Statement

As a stay-at-home mother of two, my wife has less and less time to devote to her work. Consequently, she never finds the time to appropriately and accurately keep track of her clients. While there is a lot of creativity in taking and editing pictures, she also has to do a lot of repetitive tasks. Her operations are not large enough to require sophisticated software, but she does need a simple solution to automate processes and simplify keeping track of her clients.

Overview of the system built

The system uses VBA to track and communicate with photography clients. The user can import emails that are sent from the Smugmug website and load them into the system. The system allows the user to locate an exported file containing the emails, and then reads in the data to create a new record. For clients that are not routed through the website, the system allows you to add a new client through a user form that collects all the necessary information.

Once in the system, records can be both viewed and edited with a user form. The view/edit form also has tools to communicate with the web and generate emails to clients. Based on the individual record data and a text file template, the system can send out invoice emails billing the price of services and confirming the location and time of a given shoot. After images have been edited and uploaded to the website as an album, the system can also be used to generate the log in information and link that a client needs to view their photos online. Subsequently, this information can be emailed to the client using another text file template.

Lastly, the system has a user form that can be used to search client records. This form allows the user to quickly find a record to view or edit. It can also be used to click through records of a certain kind (type of shoot, season, or location).

Final Project Write-up