Digital Wedding Photography For Dummies

Looking at Legal Matters

After you write a business plan and handle other basic tasks in setting up your wedding photography business (see the preceding section), the next step involves registering your business with the government, acquiring insurance, and protecting yourself with a contract at the beginning of every working relationship with your clients. Though this portion of establishing your business requires a lot of paperwork and may not be that exciting, it is well worth it in the end. And because you can’t avoid it even if you want to, in this section I help you get through it with relative ease.

Establishing your business legally

Though small businesses don’t have as many rules and regulations to follow as large corporations, you must still take steps to make your business legitimate, such as determining a tax structure, registering your name, and acquiring licenses. In the following sections, I go over the various tasks to complete in order to have a legally established business.

Deciding on a legal structure

The very first thing you need to do is to decide what kind of business entity, or structure, to be. The way you structure your business determines how you file your taxes at the end of every year. Following are the five types of business entities:

Sole proprietorship: Run by an individual, sole proprietorships offer no legal distinction between the business and ...