Production budgeting
Know what the job made.
Bid against actual on every line, every cost backed by the invoice it came from, deposits and payment schedules tracked to the dollar, and a margin band that answers the only question that matters.
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The problem
The budget says you are $4,200 over, and nobody can say why, who, or against which invoice. 'Actual' is a number somebody typed three weeks ago, and the job closes without anyone knowing what it made.
Actuals with receipts
A cost is not a typed number. It is a ledger entry with a vendor, an invoice, a status and a document attached.
- Every budget line's actual is the sum of the costs filed against it
- The invoice PDF rides on the cost; three weeks later the number still explains itself
- Unassigned costs still count toward the total, because the money left either way
- Fast manual lines still work: a line with no costs keeps its typed figure
What is owed, exactly
A cost is a commitment; payments are events against it. Deposits stop being a guess.
- Split any cost into deposit and balance with two due dates
- Part-paid commitments report only their remainder, everywhere
- A dashboard widget rolls up unpaid costs across every live job
- Overdue is computed against the server's calendar, so it cannot lie after midnight
The margin band
Billed against cost, on one page, from real documents on both sides.
- Billed comes from the job's actual invoices, never from estimates or hopes
- Margin as a percentage of revenue, the way a studio quotes it
- The bar turns red on a loss, quietly, before the retro does
- Agreements (NDAs, SOWs, change orders) file alongside, with both signatures tracked
The difference
Provenance, all the way down.
Any spreadsheet can subtract bid from actual. The difference is that every number here can explain itself: click the cost, see the invoice, see the payment schedule, see who the vendor was and what rate you agreed. The budget stops being a claim and becomes a record.
- An AI assist reads the documents, a human confirms every figure
- The same roll-ups feed the page, the hub card and the dashboard, so they cannot disagree
- Built by an operator who runs real jobs on it, not imagined from a spec
More the money layer does
AI invoice reading
Attach a supplier invoice and the form fills itself, for you to check.
Rate checking
Days times agreed rate against the invoiced amount, flagged when they disagree.
Cost from an email
An invoice in a linked Gmail thread becomes a cost in two clicks.
Vendor from the roster
Costs pick their vendor from the job's crew, with the agreed rate shown.
Status that means something
Received, approved, paid, advancing by click or by schedule.
SOW reading
A received SOW's deliverables and fees become project rows, proposed first.
Crew cannot see it
Budgets and costs are structurally invisible to project collaborators.
Hub card
The bid-versus-actual bar on the project's front page.
One source of truth
The page, the hub and the dashboard all compute from the same ledger.
Also here
Lives alongside it.
Each of these is a page inside the project, on the same spine, so nothing is retyped between them.
Agreements
NDAs, MSAs, SOWs and change orders, both signatures tracked.
- Masters on the client, SOWs on the job, linked
- Which side has signed, stated instead of hunted for
- Expiry flagged before a lapsed NDA surprises anyone
Works with
Estimates & invoices
From estimate to signed to paid
See how it worksWorks with
Project contacts
One roster per job
See how it worksThe whole toolkit
You just read about one of thirteen.
The rest is already in the box: every plan carries the whole toolkit, and the tiers buy room, never permission. This is the part a point solution cannot say.
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