A corporate video budget is costed twice, and only one version reaches the client

Ask a marketing director for the budget and they mean the proposal: a price, a scope, a schedule, perhaps two options. Ask a producer and they mean the internal costing that justifies that price, line by line, and decides whether the job is worth taking. Both have to say the same thing, but they are written in opposite directions — the proposal starts from what the client gets, the costing starts from what you have to buy. Keeping them in two separate files is the normal practice, and it works right up to the first change of scope. After that, every revision has to be carried across by hand, and the one that does not get carried across is the one that quietly removes the margin.

A brand film, an executive interview, an internal training series and a recruitment piece draw on the same families of cost in different proportions. The table below lists them and marks which ones the breakdown fills directly — that is, the ones whose quantities are already written down somewhere, in the script, the treatment or the outline the client signed off.

Clients think in finished films; production costs in days. The whole difficulty of commissioned budgeting sits in that conversion. Two shoot days do not cost twice one day — prep does not double, nor does the equipment pick-up — but crew fees, rental, catering and travel do. The reverse trap is worse: a single overloaded day, four interviews and two b-roll set-ups inside eight hours, is paid for in overtime and in an edit that runs long, neither of which the proposal ever mentioned. Budgeting from the breakdown reverses the order of operations. You count what has to be shot, the duration follows from the count, and the fee comes last.

Disputes on commissioned work almost always start in the same place: a request the client assumed was included and you know was not. A third round of edit notes. English subtitles. A vertical cut for social. A shoot day moved because an executive could not make the window. A music licence extended from internal use to a paid campaign. None of those requests is unreasonable; each of them has a cost, and that cost has to exist in the budget before it is asked for. The rule that holds is to express scope in quantities — two shoot days, one master, two rounds of notes — and to price everything outside it as a named option. The client then chooses with the number in front of them, and you are not quietly trading your margin for the relationship.

Corporate work rarely has a screenplay in the dramatic sense, but it always has a starting document: a treatment, an outline, an interview grid, a running order. That document already contains what you need to cost — how many sequences, shot where, with which contributors, in how many set-ups. Soldum runs AI over it, you review what has been picked up, and the counts become budget lines: a list of locations becomes travel and permits, a list of contributors becomes shooting windows and release forms, a volume of motion graphics becomes post-production days. The work you keep is the work that has value — checking, trading, negotiating — not retyping a list into a spreadsheet.

This is the practical difference between a budget and a proposal. The detailed budget gives you a cost; the proposal shows a price. The gap between them is the margin, and it should never be a surprise. In practice it often is, because the price was set first — to match the client's stated budget, or by feel for the market — and the costing was assembled afterwards to justify it. Soldum takes it the other way round: cost is built from the breakdown, margin is applied as a percentage, and the price follows. When the client's budget is lower, you can see immediately by how much and which quantities would have to go — one shoot day fewer, a contributor recorded remotely, a lighter post-production — instead of accepting and hoping it works out.

Even on a short format, people are most of the cost, and they are the hardest lines to estimate from memory. Freelance crew are booked by the day, their fees carry payroll charges on top of the gross, and those charges move every time a day moves — which is exactly the recalculation a spreadsheet stops doing the moment someone pastes a value over a formula. Corporate work adds a specificity of its own: the people on camera are usually the client's own employees rather than performers, which shifts the question from fees to permissions — for how long, in which territories, on which channels. Soldum keeps release and usage rights as budget lines rather than as a checkbox nobody owns, and recalculates payroll charges from the payroll itself. For productions shooting in France, it also exports the normalised numbered-series presentation that French funders and broadcasters expect, which matters if the client is a French group with public co-funding.

A share of a corporate video's cost is not yours to set: the rental house, the studio, the motion designer, the dubbing suite, the subtitling vendor. Until their answers arrive, your budget rests on estimates, which is normal. What is not normal is the answer arriving and feeding into nothing. In Soldum every need identified in the breakdown can go out as a quote request, the replies are compared line against line, and the chosen one replaces the estimate in the budget. You see the effect on your cost — and therefore on your margin — before you confirm a price you will not be able to reopen.

On commissioned work margin rarely disappears at once. It erodes through small decisions taken during production, each reasonable on its own: half a day more in the edit, a trip added, a rental extended by a day. To watch it go you need three figures on each line rather than one — the estimate from the budget, the committed amount (a supplier quote accepted, a booking confirmed, a contract signed) and the actual, what has been invoiced. The alert that helps fires on the committed figure: raised as you approve the rental quote, it still leaves you the choice between renegotiating, trading elsewhere or accepting it; discovered when invoices arrive three weeks after delivery, it leaves nothing to decide. Because the tracked lines are the budget's own lines, there is no mapping table to maintain between the two.

Not every corporate video justifies the same apparatus, and pretending otherwise is how a one-day interview shoot acquires a four-page budget nobody reads. The table below is a decision guide: find the row that matches the job in front of you, and the level of costing follows from how much is moving and who has to sign it off.

A corporate video budget rarely exists in one state. There is the one you sent, the one that came back with a shoot day removed, and the one that absorbed the English version somebody raised in a meeting. Soldum keeps all of them dated and named, but exactly one is approved at any moment, and that one is what the cost tracking measures against and what matches the purchase order. The others stay readable without competing with it, which removes the meeting where the client quotes one figure and you quote another and both of you are reading a real document. Every version exports to PDF for the client and Excel for you.

Worth saying before you open an account. Soldum does not write your treatment and does not build your creative pitch: the starting document is imported, not drafted here. It is not invoicing or accounting software — the client invoice, the journals and the statutory accounts stay with your finance tool and your accountant, who receives the cost tracking as an export. It does not run payroll: the budget computes gross pay and the charges on it, but payslips are issued elsewhere. And it does not edit the film. The scope is preparation — from the brief arriving to the crew leaving for the shoot — plus cost tracking during production.

The least risky test uses a film you have already delivered: upload its script or outline and compare the budget Soldum produces with the one you sent, then with what the job actually cost. You are comparing three costings of the same film, with nothing dismantled and nothing migrated. A 7-day free trial is enough to settle it. Pricing is per account rather than per seat: €49 excl. VAT per month on Solo for one active project at a time, €179 excl. VAT per month on Studio for unlimited projects with the whole team invited at no per-person cost, and 25% off on annual commitment.