u/IllustratorPure6398

Hey everyone, I am currently setting up the business side of things for my new wedding photography setup and trying to keep my overhead as close to absolute zero as possible. I keep seeing everyone recommend HoneyBook, Dubsado, or Studio Ninja for like $40+ a month, but it honestly feels like total overkill for just a solo photographer starting out.

My plan is to keep things super minimalist:

• Booking: Just lock in the wedding date on Google Calendar and throw the client details in the description.
• Deposit: Send a manual Stripe invoice for 30% to lock in the booking.
• Balance: Manually count backward 6 weeks on my phone calendar and set a Google reminder to send the remaining 70% invoice.

This seems incredibly simple to me, but I am honestly terrified of missing a payment deadline or looking totally unprofessional early on. Before I commit to doing it this way, I have three quick questions for the vets here:

1. Is managing the split payments and tracking those relative event dates manually actually that much of a headache in reality?
2. Am I missing something massive here that is going to blow up in my face later?
3. Or are people just paying for these big CRMs because they like the fancy features?

Would love a reality check from anyone who prefers to keep things simple!

I've recently migrated from Notion to Obsidian and I'm looking for a way to replicate Notion-style data tables.

I know a lot of people use the Dataview plugin for this, but I really don't like the workflow where each row has to be its own separate note. I want to keep all the tabular data inside a single note.

What plugins or setups would you recommend for functional, database-like tables contained within a single file?