Every multi-artist studio runs on one of three money models, and every studio argument about money comes from the same place: the model lives in somebody's head instead of on paper, and the reconstruction happens at the end of the month with different memories on each side.
The models first, then the boring ritual that prevents the arguments.
The three arrangements
Commission. The shop keeps a percentage of everything an artist brings in — commonly anywhere from 30% to 50%, covering the chair, supplies, the front desk, the walk-in flow. Artist does $6,000, shop keeps 40%, artist takes home $3,600. The shop's income scales with the artist's; slow months hurt both.
Booth rent. The artist pays a flat monthly rent for the chair — a few hundred to well over a thousand depending on the market — and keeps everything they make. The artist is effectively a business renting space. Great months are all theirs; so are dead ones. The shop's income is predictable; the artist carries the variance.
Hybrid. Some of each — a lower commission plus a small rent, or rent that converts to commission above a threshold, or different deals per artist because they were negotiated years apart. This is where tracking dies, because no two people at the shop can state everyone's deal from memory, and nobody wants to be the one who asks.
None of these is "correct." Commission suits shops that feed artists work; rent suits established artists with their own following; hybrids happen because real shops are negotiations, not spreadsheets. The only wrong version is the untracked one.
The math that has to be written down
For splits to be argument-proof, three numbers per artist per month need a shared home:
- Revenue — what the artist actually charged, per session, dated. Not "about six grand." The session log is the source of truth; if sessions don't get logged with prices, everything downstream is a vibe.
- The arrangement — the actual deal: "shop keeps 40%" or "$800/month rent," written where both parties can see it. If it's hybrid, both parts.
- The result — revenue × the deal = shop's cut and artist's keep, computed the same way every month, visible to the person it concerns.
That last phrase carries weight. In an owner-led shop, the owner sees everyone's numbers — they're collecting the commission. Each artist should still see their own math without asking, because "just trust the total" is how resentment compounds. And in ownerless shared spaces, the right answer is usually that nobody sees anyone else's revenue at all — you split the rent, not the information.
The monthly ritual
End of month, fifteen minutes: pull each artist's priced sessions, apply their arrangement, and share each artist's own summary with them before money moves. Not after — before. The point of the preview is that discrepancies ("that $400 was a deposit, not a session price") get resolved as bookkeeping instead of as a confrontation about a payout that already happened.
Booth rent is even simpler but has its own failure mode: rent is once-monthly regardless of sessions, so track it as a standing line, not something recomputed — the classic hybrid-shop error is accidentally charging a renter commission math in a busy month.
Tools
A spreadsheet does this: one tab of priced sessions (date, artist, amount), one tab of arrangements, twelve monthly summaries a year. It survives exactly as long as the person maintaining it stays disciplined, which is usually until the shop gets busy — the month the tracking matters most is the month nobody has time for the spreadsheet.
This is one of the things we wired into Stencil directly: each artist on the roster carries their arrangement (commission % or monthly booth rent), sessions log prices as part of normal client tracking, and the Money page computes the monthly table by itself — owner sees the shop, each artist sees their own, shared spaces keep everyone's numbers private to them. The summary exists because the sessions were logged anyway, which is the trick: splits tracking that's a side effect of client tracking actually survives busy months.
However you run it — the deal in writing, sessions priced when they happen, previews before payouts. Money stays boring. Boring is the goal.
Related: Tracking a multi-session sleeve · Guest artists and their splits