Cost Tracking: Actuals vs Budget

The budget we built last episode is an estimate. This episode is about what actually leaves the account once you are in production.

Every line in your budget can have expenses attached to it, so you can see what you have spent and what is left, line by line.

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Step 1: Log an Expense Against a Budget Line

1. Click Budget in the top navigation bar.
2. Select Actuals in the left sidebar.

Your budget lines are all here under their Code and Description, with three money columns:

• Estimated: what you planned
• Actual: what you have spent
• Variance: the difference between the two

3. Find the drone line under 2100 Equipment and click the line.

The expense panel opens on the right, and everything to do with expenses happens in there. It is headed with the line you picked and its account code, so you always know what you are spending against, and right now it is empty.

4. Click Add Expense at the bottom of the panel. A form opens inside it with Description, Amount, Category, Date, Status, Notes and Attachments.

Here is what you are recording. We booked the drone from a rental house, Skyline Aerial Hire, for the two days it is needed, and they invoiced $800 — the $400 a day you put on the element in Episode 4. Their terms are half up front, so we transferred a $400 deposit to hold the booking, and the balance falls due when the drone goes back.

The deposit is the money that has actually left the account, so that is the expense.

So three fields:

5. Description — Drone deposit, INV-2041
6. Amount — 400
7. Date — 7 October, the day the transfer cleared

Category, Status and Notes can wait. The Attachments section here would let you add the paperwork now, but we will do it in the next step so you can see where it lives afterwards. Click Save.

The drone’s Actual reads $400 against an $800 estimate, and its Variance shows the $400 still to go — the balance owed on return. Variance is coloured: green while you are under, red the moment it goes negative and the line is over budget. That is per line, so a single line going over shows up on its own rather than buried in a production total.

The totals footer along the bottom carries the same figures for the production as a whole — Estimated, Actual, Variance, and what is left over labelled Remaining. Click it to expand the four figures larger.

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Step 2: Attach the Invoice and Proof of Payment

Both documents are in the demo pack under Documents/.

1. Select the expense in the panel. Its Attached Documents section reads No documents attached.
2. Click Add File and attach the invoice, Invoice INV-2041 - Skyline Aerial Hire.pdf.
3. Attach Proof of Payment - INV-2041 deposit.pdf the same way.

Two documents rather than one, because they answer different questions. The invoice is what you were charged and on what terms. The proof of payment is evidence the money moved. An auditor or a completion guarantor will ask for both, and on a real production they arrive days apart, so you will often attach the second one later.

Both appear under Attached Documents, and the row shows it has an invoice linked. The files travel inside the project rather than living in somebody’s email, so when a financier asks what a line was spent on, the answer is on the line.

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Step 3: See the Whole Picture

Select Summary in the left sidebar: total budget, total spent, and where the variance is. Categories that have gone over are flagged for you.

Cashflow sits alongside it, tracking money coming in against money going out, which is how you spot a short week in advance.

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Step 4: Pay the Gaffer on the Payment Schedule

Select Payment Schedule in the left sidebar. This is the same money laid out against dates rather than against budget lines, and it answers a different question: not what a line cost, but what has to go out and when.

Your lines run down the left and your dates run across the top. Where a line has money falling due on a date, that cell carries a chip with the amount on it and a coloured dot beside it:

Dot	Meaning
🟢 Green	Paid
🔴 Red	The date has gone by and it still has not been
🟠 Amber	Falls due inside the next seven days
⚪ Grey	Further out than that

You can log a payment from here rather than going back to Actuals:

1. Find the Gaffer / Grip line you put a rate on in Episode 7.
2. Right-click its cell on the last day of the shoot and choose Add Expense.
3. The dialog opens against that line with the date already filled in from the cell you clicked, so the only things you type are what it was and what it cost.
4. He is on 600 a day across five shoot days, so enter 3000 and describe it as the gaffer’s week. A chip appears in the cell.
5. Once the money has actually gone out, right-click the cell again and choose Mark as Paid. The dot turns green.

Hover a chip and it breaks down: the period it covers, how many payments sit in it, the total, and what has been paid against what is still outstanding.

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Step 5: Export a Cost Report

1. Click Export on the Actuals page. The export dialog opens.
2. Choose the Actuals Report for a styled PDF.
3. Tick the option to also export invoices & POPs if you want the underlying files copied into the folder alongside the report.
4. Click Export and choose your Dead Tired project folder.

There is also an outstanding only filter, for when the question is what has not been paid yet rather than what has.

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Your budget now tracks against what you are really spending. Next we pin the locations on a map, which is what lets FilmBase plan the driving and put real weather on a call sheet.