Video production budget software, built from your script

In video production the word covers three different objects, and mixing them up is what turns a profitable job into a break-even one. The client quote states a selling price, usually fixed, sometimes with options. The production budget states what making the film will actually cost, line by line: it is the internal document everything else derives from. The final cost is what you measure after delivery, and it tells you whether the job held. Soldum works on the second one — it gives you the detailed cost of production, which is what you price from.

It is rarely an arithmetic mistake, it is a question of pace. The brief lands on Monday, the answer is due Thursday, and the script is not locked — so you are costing a hypothesis. Every round with the client moves a shoot day, adds a cast member, drops a location, and in a spreadsheet those changes are carried across by hand, line by line, with the derived amounts forgotten every single time. Then there is volume: a company answering fifteen briefs a quarter redoes fifteen times a job that is largely identical. Automating the breakdown attacks both at once — the speed and the repetition.

The breakdown already knows how many scenes are shot, in which locations, with which cast and extras, what wardrobe, which vehicles and what technical needs. Those are exactly the quantities a budget runs on. Soldum turns them into budget lines: a number of shoot days becomes equipment rental and crew days, a list of locations becomes location fees, permits and transport, a shooting schedule becomes meals and hotel nights. Every line carries its unit — day, week, flat fee — its unit price and its quantity, so it stays readable, arguable and editable one at a time. That matters the day a client asks where a number comes from.

The structure resembles a feature film budget, but the weights are different: preparation is short, post-production carries a large share on commissioned work, and rights — music, stock footage, usage buyouts for cast appearing in advertising — become a category of their own that is routinely underestimated. The table below sets out what each cost centre covers and which ones the breakdown fills in directly.

This is where hand-built budgets drift the most, because these amounts are not typed in — they are derived from the others. Employer contributions are calculated on the payroll total, so they move the moment a crew position changes or a day is added. Soldum attaches cast fees and crew salaries to the budget lines they belong to, and recalculates the derived amounts on every change instead of leaving them at the value they had two versions ago. If you shoot in France or with a French partner, one detail is worth knowing: rates can be checked against the French collective agreement minimums — the industry-wide pay floors that govern film and television crews there — and contracts follow the same data.

A large share of a video budget is bought outside: equipment rental, studio, post house, catering, transport. As long as those numbers are estimates, your budget is an estimate. Soldum prepares the quote requests from the needs the breakdown produced — right dates, right quantities, right description — collects the answers in one place and compares them line by line. The option you pick lands on the matching budget line, and the reasoning behind the decision stays attached to the project instead of being buried in an inbox.

On a fixed-fee job, the gap between the budget and the real cost is the result. So every line carries its estimate, then what has actually been committed as the production moves: a supplier quote approved, a booking confirmed, a contract signed. You read the difference between what you planned and what you committed, cost centre by cost centre, and overruns are flagged as they appear — not when the invoices land, by which point there is nothing left to arbitrate.

A video budget exists in several states: the one sent with the pitch, the one that comes back trimmed after negotiation, the one that absorbs the extra shoot day agreed mid-project. Soldum keeps them all, dated and named, but only one is approved at any given time, and that one is the reference for cost tracking. The others stay readable without ever competing with it — which avoids the familiar situation where two files are in circulation and nobody is sure which one the client signed off.

Worth saying before you open an account. Soldum does not write your client proposal: it does not lay out your terms, apply your markup or manage your rate card options. It does not invoice, does not do your bookkeeping, and does not replace your payroll system. What it produces is the detailed cost of production and the tracking that follows it — the figure you price from, not the document the client signs. And on a project with no written material at all, the automatic breakdown has little to read: the benefit narrows to the budget, the schedule and the cost tracking.

The lowest-risk test is a real project rather than a sample: upload the script of a brief you are currently answering and compare the budget you get with the one you would have built by hand. The first project is free, which is enough to decide. On pricing, the subscription is billed per account rather than per seat, so inviting a line producer, a production coordinator and an editor costs nothing extra — the opposite of per-seat pricing, which pushes teams to restrict access to the one document everyone needs to read.