Film production contract software: the deal is already in the system before the contract exists

Whatever the territory, a short-term production engagement is a written agreement: it names the role, the term, the rate, the employing entity and the agreement or award it falls under. None of that is invented at drafting time. All of it exists earlier, in another production document. That is what makes retyping absurd — it creates no information, it duplicates some, and duplicated facts always drift apart. The table below is the test to put any tool through: for each row, ask it where it reads the value from.

In Soldum a contract is not a file you open, it is something generated. The booking already holds everything the text has to print — the person, the role, the period, the rate, the employing company — and generating simply pours it in. The text itself is your company's template: start from a Soldum one, write it in the editor, publish it, make it the default for that contract type, and every production in the company picks it up. Each published template carries a version number printed at the foot of the contract, so two years later you can still tell which wording was signed. A field that does not exist is rejected when you save rather than printed as a blank — that is the kind of typo you otherwise discover on a signed PDF.

Social security number, bank details and home address are the three fields that generate the most email attachments on a production, and they are exactly the ones the office does not need before signature. In Soldum they are left blank on the generated contract and filled in by the crew member through their own details form, which they share with the production; they appear on the signed copy. Where a number is still being issued, the case is handled and stated as such instead of blocking the hire. Afterwards the signed documents stay in the person's own vault, which removes the single most common post-wrap request: can you send me my contract again?

Bulk send is the feature everyone expects, and the one that does the most damage when it is naive: sending in bulk means propagating in bulk. In Soldum the send is filtered by department or by start week, and a preview runs first: it names what will go out and what is held back, with the reason. Contract never generated, contract now stale because the booking changed, a field still to complete, template not published, no email address — each reason is named, against the people concerned. A bulk send never overrides a blank field: you fill it in, or you send that one contract on its own and own the decision. That is the difference between a mail merge and an engagement workflow.

The crew member's signature is only half the journey: until the production countersigns, nothing is concluded. That is the step that stalls, because it depends on one person, usually the busiest. A signing book solves the volume: everything signed and waiting on the production — contracts and amendments alike — is countersigned in one pass, with name, function and initials entered once for the batch, each document still processed on its own so one rejection does not stop the rest. On the crew side, reminders are set per production: after how many days, how many times at most, with what wording. A fresh link goes to the signer instead of another attachment. And a control list answers, on one screen, the only question that matters the night before day one: who has not signed.

This is where improvised setups give way. An end date pushed by two days, a rate revised, a role changed: in a word processor you reopen the file, correct it and reprint — and two versions of the same contract are now in circulation, one of them signed. In Soldum a signed contract stands: changing a contractual field requires an amendment, which goes through the same signature and countersignature route and carries its own number. Purely administrative corrections — the employer's address, the signatory's name, the city of signature — stay possible without one, because demanding a signature for those would only teach everyone to work around the rule. While a contract is unsigned, by contrast, regenerating it replaces the previous version and closes any signing link still open: there can never be two valid links out to the same person.

A crew contract is never on its own. Before it, the hire has to be declared to the authorities in most territories, before the first day; Soldum pre-fills that declaration from the employing company, the crew member's details and the booking, and keeps the acknowledgement filed with the contract for as long as the contract itself. During the shoot, staff arrivals and departures read from the same place. After it, the end of engagement opens its own packet: the employment certificate, the monthly employer statement, the payroll reporting codes. None of those asks for fresh data entry — all of them re-read the contract. That is why a contract tool cut off from payroll and the schedule always drifts back into being a folder of files.

Three families of tools compete for this work, and feature count is not what separates them — all of them can produce a PDF and collect a signature. What separates them is what happens when the booking changes. A word processor and a shared spreadsheet cost nothing and hold up on a five-person short; their limit is that no file knows an end date moved. A generic HR tool or a standalone e-signature platform handles the route and the audit trail well, but has no idea what a rate card, a day player fee or a schedule is: you end up typing in everything you already know elsewhere, and it will never tell you a rate has dropped below a floor. A production chain links the breakdown, the schedule, the booking, the contract and payroll in one database. Disclosure: Soldum publishes one of the solutions described here.

The reason contracts pile up is rarely workload in the abstract — it is that the same fact has to be entered four times before it is true everywhere. The breakdown says how many people a scene needs; the schedule says on which days; the booking says at what rate; the contract prints it; payroll pays it. Break that chain anywhere and someone becomes the human joint holding two systems together, which is exactly the work that does not scale. Soldum is built around the chain rather than around a module list: AI reads the script, proposes a breakdown, derives a shooting schedule, turns crew requirements into bookings, generates the contracts and keeps the budget attached to all of it. Nothing the AI proposes is applied without your approval — a review queue shows what would change, with a timestamped history.

Worth stating plainly rather than burying. Soldum was built on French productions, so the French short-term engagement used across the industry there — the CDDU, a fixed-term contract specific to sectors that hire by the project — is modelled rather than approximated, along with the collective agreement rate floors, the particular rules that apply to minors and to non-EU crew, and the end-of-engagement paperwork French payroll expects. If you shoot in France, co-produce with a French partner or employ crew through a French entity, that is the difference between a tool that outputs what your accountant expects and one that outputs something to be reworked. If you do not, it changes nothing for you: the chain described above — booking to contract to signature to amendment — is the part that travels, and your own templates carry your own terms.

Worth saying before you open an account. It will not tell you whether a short-term engagement is lawful for the role you are hiring: that is a legal question, settled with your own advisers, and no software carries that responsibility for you. It does not negotiate rates; it only shows the gap against the floor that applies. It does not replace your payroll provider or your accountant — it hands them data that has been kept current rather than reassembled. And it is not a substitute for reading your own contract: the template is yours, published by your company, and what it says is what gets signed. Pricing is not published: it is agreed on a 20-minute call with the Soldum team and depends on your company and its projects. Fourteen free days, no card required, are enough to put a real set of contracts through the whole route and judge for yourself.