This post is a follow up to my post “Top 5 Business Processes Causing Hollywood to Hemorrhage Cash on Productions.” Based on current conditions on many productions we have identified task duplication which is causing pain in getting an accurate financial history. When addressing these concerns, a typical response is nobody cares.
People do care, but “leadership” is needed to help motivate the creatives to get their crews using helpful digital tools that will serve the industry well. The lack of urgency in changing from paper to digital financial solutions has a myriad of reasons from the absurd that it is illegal to complacent with a culture of it is good enough, “if it is not broke do not fix it.” There has been a lack of innovation and questioning of the business process. The current state of doing business on productions in the industry is decades behind getting ready to play late adopter and follower of digital financial solutions.
When the employees at the studio have limited production experience or have not worked on productions in years, start making decisions about production policies mistakes will and do get made. When you have successful producers, who don’t have the digital business experience necessary to make an informative decision you get stagnation. The popular ad hoc solutions do not provide optimal performance, which falls in line with the industry culture of good enough.
To follow are some examples of the current pains and an example of how ALineProducer’s features eliminate the task duplication. The system also increases the consistency of information while replacing the old paper technology with a well thought out digital solution. Tell us if you agree.
- Budgeting
- The current practice is to pass budgets back and forth via email. ALineProducer eliminates the budgets emailed in their silos where the Producer and Accountant each have their version.
- They can genuinely work together.
- Track the changes.
- Approve the line items as the contracts are secured.
- ALineProducer eliminates the variables of budget formats in addition to ensuring the accuracy of the data, the first time.
- The current practice is to pass budgets back and forth via email. ALineProducer eliminates the budgets emailed in their silos where the Producer and Accountant each have their version.
- Purchase Orders
- ALineProducer eliminates paper purchase orders, the duplication of data entry, and the resources it takes to pass the paper around for approval.
- ALineProducer eliminates the scattered nature of paper purchase orders and the effort it takes to communicate the data to accounting.
- The origination point of the Purchase Order is in a place where all authorized users have access to the information from inception. No waiting for the crew to turn in their documents so accounting can figure out where the costs are estimated.
- Payroll
- ALineProducer eliminates the duplication of effort keeping track of the cast and crew hours worked.
- ALineProducer eliminates the duplication of effort in calculating and approving the payments to cast and crew.
- ALineProducer eliminates the duplication of creating reports. No more individual spreadsheets by day for call sheets, production reports, exhibit g’s, etc.
- Payments
- ALineProducer eliminates the circulation of payment requests which currently travels by paper from one person to the next. We give authorized users access to the information from inception erasing the silo’s created by paper.
- ALineProducer eliminates the P.O. payment chart that many accountants generate using pen and paper or a spreadsheet.
- ALineProducer eliminates the duplication of effort in getting crew and vendors paid. It is
a seamless integration with Purchase Orders, and Payroll.
When a business process is designed in a digital system using best practice and striving for the 3rd normal form and beyond, data redundancy is reduced. The above examples of task duplication are only the beginning of what ALineProducer does for creating continuity on a production. By having only one place for data to be stored and used increases the consistency of information. In turn, eliminates the duplication of effort by the crew to get their siloed information to match each other.
ALineProducer eliminates spending on human resources where the job duties are redundant. Yes, job responsibilities will and are changing with the development of digital systems. Yes, accounting jobs are changing in Hollywood, resources are shifting with each day the industry moves closer to digitizing it’s back office business processes.
