Breaking Down Final Costs on a Feature

I've been asked to share more about what I do as an indie producer. Well, today I'm heading over to my business partner's home to break down the final costs on our feature Not Since You. 

We were able to finance Not Since You with a mix of cash and in-kind investments as well as partial crew deferrals. And now that we have a screener for buyers and a week before we receive them from the disc vendor, Jade and I are going to spend the day crunching the numbers of how much and when we owe everyone money. Of course, we anticipate a sale (important to remain positive always) so we want to be ready with a plan of where the sales proceeds will be going.

This is not going to be a fun or easy process. Yay! We have our cash investments from a number of investors, in-kind investments, crew deferrals, anticipated music licensing, legal, and sales fees, and estimates for keeping the business running each year as well as SAG residuals. 

To date, we have kept very accurate records of investments, deferrals, and costs. We tracked every expense in Quickbooks from day one. Each month, Jade balances the Quickbooks file with any costs. If we had to do it all over again, it would take weeks to recreate. 

Our goal is to do a cheat sheet of what we owe in each category. In essence, we will be finalizing our accounts payable, which should amount to over a hundred people owed (this is when crew deferrals get tedious to deal with). 

I like to have information at my fingertips that gives me the overall outlook of the project. I am all about the big picture. So now we have the incredible task of melding this information into a master document. And that's what we will be doing today and probably a couple more days too. As we go to buyers, I want to know exactly where every penny needs to go and when we will go into profit!