Runs your clients.
And your assistants.crew.

bckendIQ is studio management software for photography and video businesses that hire crew. It runs the client side — enquiries, quotes, contracts, invoices and galleries — and the crew side — dispatch, shoot-day attendance, performance review and pay — in one system. When a client confirms a booking, the shoot opens automatically in the crew system, so the client record and the crew record are the same record.

Studios that book clients directly and staff their shoots with people they do not employ: wedding photographers running second shooters, video production companies hiring freelance crew, content studios with a bench of editors, and portrait studios with part-time shooters. If you work entirely alone, a cheaper client-side tool will serve you better.

It calculates and records what each person is owed, but it does not send the money. From the hours actually worked and the review outcome, bckendIQ produces an exact amount in whole cents, locks it against change, and issues a payslip. You then pay by your existing method — bank transfer, PayPal, whatever you already use — and mark it as settled. A direct disbursement rail is planned, not shipped.

Each shoot carries crew slots by role and headcount. Your bench claims the dates they can work, clock in and out per session on the day, and their hours are reconciled against what was scheduled. Overtime is granted as a recorded decision with a reason. The payable follows from the verified hours rather than from memory or a spreadsheet.

HoneyBook runs the client relationship well and has done for ten years — at $29 a month for a solo user it is hard to beat. Every payment feature in it moves money from your client to you. It has no crew roster, no shoot-day attendance, no performance review and no way to work out what a second shooter is owed. bckendIQ covers the same client workflow and then keeps going into the crew side.

Yes. Staff check in when they start work; you see who’s in, where, and when. Geo-fenced check-ins for on-set work, shift reminders, and overtime tracking — no more Slack DMs asking who’s on set yet.

Weekly scorecards are the core ritual. Employees self-score against their role-specific KPIs. Managers review and add narrative feedback. Leadership sees the rollup. One thread per person, one source of truth, no review-day surprises.

Yes — AI-generated onboarding plans, structured 1-on-1 templates, goal tracking across quarters, discipline records, payroll, and a full org directory. The HR basics, done well.

Yes. In-app announcements broadcast to the whole team or to specific roles, with email fallback for people who haven’t been online lately. Mailing-list-style team comms without a separate tool.

A real-time snapshot of whether your business is actually working: who’s performing, who’s slipping, attendance trends, payroll exposure by currency, scorecard rollups, and goal progress. The view a studio owner needs to make decisions, in one screen.

Every query is scoped to your organization at the database layer — multi-tenant isolation enforced server-side, not via UI filters. Encrypted in transit, modern authentication, automated backups. See the security page for the full breakdown.

bckendIQ is free to use through 31 October 2026. Paid plans have not been announced yet — we are still working out the right structure with the studios running on it. No card is required to sign up, nothing is charged automatically, and studios that join during the beta keep whatever launch pricing we settle on for as long as they stay subscribed.

Under ten minutes. Tell us your studio name and your job titles — Claude generates a tailored KPI template per role that you edit and ship. No 40-step onboarding wizard.

bckendIQ is open now — create your account and get started today, free during private beta. General-availability pricing comes later; beta studios are grandfathered into a locked rate.