Sponsored posts pay real money, and most creators still price them on a feeling — a number a bigger account once mentioned, or whatever the brand offered plus a little. The Creator Brand-Deal & Sponsorship Workbook replaces the guessing with numbers you can defend: what each deliverable is worth, what a whole deal should cost, and which brands and platforms actually pay you. It’s one connected workbook for Excel and Google Sheets — a rate card, a pricing engine, a pipeline, a deliverables tracker, an income log, and a tax set-aside — built for creators who monetize.
How do you price a brand deal?
You price it from the one thing a brand is actually buying: your reach. The Rate Card tab takes your average reach for each deliverable and a floor CPM you set — the least you’ll accept per 1,000 views — and returns a base rate for every Reel, TikTok, video, and Story set you offer. It’s a number that comes straight from your own analytics, so you can explain it line by line instead of hoping the brand accepts it.
How do you charge for usage rights?
The single most common money a creator leaves on the table is usage rights. A post that lives on your feed is one price; the same content run as a paid ad, whitelisted from your handle, or licensed for a year is worth far more. The Deal Pricing tab builds the full quote from your rate card, then prices the usage, exclusivity, and rush a flat fee always forgets — and shows the effective CPM the fee works out to, so you know at a glance whether a deal clears your floor or quietly falls beneath it.
Track every deal from pitch to paid
Brand deals slip through the gaps — a pitch never followed up, an invoice never sent, a payment thirty days late. The Brand-Deal Pipeline keeps every deal in one place with its agreed fee, the upfront collected, and the balance still owed, so you always know what’s live and whose money is late. The Deliverables & Deadlines tab puts one row on every contracted post — due date, posted date, and status — so you never miss a deadline or lose track of a brand’s approval.
See what your content is really worth
The Income & Effective Rate tab puts each deal’s fee against its real reach, posts, and hours, and shows the effective CPM, the pay per post, and the pay per hour — so you learn which brands, platforms, and formats actually pay, and carry a real number into your next negotiation. The Expenses & Tax tab logs the business costs that lower your tax bill and calculates what to set aside for the quarterly bill, because brand-deal income is 1099 income and no one withholds it for you. The Dashboard rolls it all into the few numbers that matter.
Works in Excel and Google Sheets — and it’s yours
The workbook works natively in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice Calc, with no conversion. Prefer Sheets? A clickable link in your download opens a ready-made native copy — click Make a copy and the whole workbook lands in your Google Drive, every dropdown, formula, and color already set up. It ships pre-loaded with a worked example so nothing is blank on open; clear it and enter your own deals.
Own it, don’t rent it. This is a workbook you keep for one payment — not another monthly app to rent. It sits right where a solo creator needs it: past a blank spreadsheet, and well short of an expensive influencer-management platform.
Try the free version first
Want to test-drive the method before you buy? The free Brand-Deal Rate Calculator prices a single deal from your reach and deliverables — then step up to the full workbook for the pipeline, deliverables, income, and tax tabs.
Ready to grow beyond a spreadsheet?
When your deals, deliverables, and payments outgrow a folder of files, Ardent Seller is the living version of this workbook — your clients, jobs, costs, and payments tracked in one place, with profit computed for you across the whole business. There’s a free plan to start. The workbook is where you learn your numbers; Ardent Seller is where you run them at scale.
A business reference, not licensed tax, accounting, or legal advice — every figure shown is illustrative, and your reach, rates, and local tax rules are your own to confirm.
