A film budget template gets you started. It does not keep you there.

Strip away the formatting and every template is three layers stacked on top of each other. The top sheet is the one-page summary a financier reads: category subtotals, above-the-line and below-the-line totals, then fringes, overhead and contingency down to the bottom-line figure. Beneath it sit the accounts — numbered categories such as cast, production staff, camera, art department, post-production — each with its own detail page. And at the bottom of each detail page are the lines that carry the real work: a unit, a quantity, a rate, and a total that multiplies them. A template gives you the first two layers for free. The third, the only one that decides whether the number is right, is entirely yours to fill.

The account names vary between territories and between houses, but the substance does not. The table below lists what a general-purpose template covers, what belongs in each section, and — the column that matters here — whether the quantities can be read out of the screenplay rather than estimated from memory. That distinction is the whole argument of this page: roughly two thirds of a film budget is driven by counts that already exist in the script, and the rest depends on decisions the script cannot make for you.

Look at the bottom rows of that table. Fringes are a percentage of payroll, so they move every time a crew position or a shoot day changes. Overhead and contingency are percentages of the total, so they move every time anything else moves. In a spreadsheet these are formulas, and formulas survive exactly as long as nobody inserts a row in the wrong place, pastes a value over a reference, or exports the file to send it to a co-producer who then edits their copy. The failure is never dramatic: the sheet still adds up, it just adds up to a number that no longer describes the film. Nobody notices until the cost report starts disagreeing with the budget, which is to say several weeks after the decision that caused it.

This is the part a template cannot help with, no matter how carefully it is built. Before anything can be costed, somebody has to know how many scenes shoot, in how many locations, with which cast members and how many days each one works, which costumes, which vehicles, which technical requirements. That is the screenplay breakdown, and it is what costs a line producer days of work — not typing the numbers in. Soldum has AI do that pass on the PDF or Final Draft you upload, you review it, and the counts become budget lines: shoot days become crew salaries and equipment rental, a location list becomes site fees, permits and transport, a schedule becomes hotel nights and catering. Nothing is copied from one document into another, because there is only one set of numbers.

During prep the question is almost never what the film costs, it is what this change costs. Losing a location, adding a night exterior, pushing the shoot by a month, swapping a crane shot for a dolly move: each of those is decided in an afternoon, and the budget is usually updated long afterwards, when nothing can be traded any more. A template has no way to answer, because it does not know the schedule — somebody has to translate the move into crew hours, extended rental, hotel nights and travel, then type the result in. In Soldum the schedule and the budget are two views of the same data: you move the day, and the cost of moving it appears before you confirm.

A budget template holds the estimate. Production needs two more figures on the same line. The committed amount is what you have already promised — a supplier quote accepted, a rental confirmed, a contract signed — and the actual is what has been invoiced. The useful alert fires on the committed figure, not the actual one: an overrun flagged when you approve the rental house's quote still leaves you the choice between renegotiating, trading elsewhere or accepting it, while the same overrun discovered when invoices arrive three weeks after the wrap leaves nothing to decide. Soldum carries all three on each account, and because those accounts came out of the breakdown, there is no mapping table to maintain between the budget's structure and the cost report's.

No film has one budget. It has the version you sent to the financier, the one that came back reduced, the one that absorbed a new partner, and the one production is actually working to. With files, all four exist at once, in inboxes, and the only way to tell them apart is a filename someone remembered to update. Soldum keeps every version dated and named, but exactly one is approved at any moment, and that one is what the cost tracking measures against. The others stay readable without competing with it — which removes the conversation where two people quote different bottom-line figures in the same meeting and both are reading a real document.

A template built for one market carries that market's assumptions: its account numbering, its above-the-line and below-the-line split, its payroll fringes. Take it to another territory and the structure survives while the rates and the social charges do not. This matters most where a funder expects a specific presentation. If you shoot in France, for instance, public funders and broadcasters read budgets in a normalised set of numbered series rather than a house layout, and rebuilding that structure by hand at every revision is where the time you saved upstream goes. Soldum produces that presentation directly for French productions, and standard Excel and PDF exports everywhere else — the conversion step is not accelerated, it simply does not exist.

A template is the right answer more often than software vendors admit, and it costs nothing. The question is not which is better in the abstract but which fits the project in front of you. The table below is the decision guide: find the row that describes your situation, and the recommendation follows from how often your numbers will change and who has to read them.

Worth saying before you open an account. Soldum does not write your screenplay: the text is imported, not drafted here. It is not a general accounting package — journals, ledgers and statutory accounts stay with 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 file anything with a funder on your behalf, nor guarantee that an application succeeds; what it guarantees is a budget that is structured, internally consistent and exportable. The scope is preparation — from the script arriving to the crew leaving for the shoot — plus cost tracking during production.

The least risky test uses a project whose cost you already know: upload the script of a finished film and compare the budget Soldum produces with the one you built by hand. You are then comparing two costings of the same text, with nothing dismantled and nothing migrated. The 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.