Lessons

Accrued costs (accruals) are the actual project costs incurred to date (both paid and unpaid) or, in other words, current liabilities to third-party contractors. 

For example, you signed a contract for renting a stage from 1 January, and the cost per day is 10,000 RUB. As of 5 January, you already owe the contractor 5 x 10,000 = 50,000. In order to see the daily accruing payables to the contractor in the system, you need to set up a periodic accrual in the amount of 10,000 RUB per day. 

Or you “attached” to the project a production designer with the monthly salary of 100,000 RUB, as from 1 June. As of 15 June, you already owe them 50,000 RUB. If you create a periodic accrual (100,000 RUB per month), the system will update the payables to the production designer daily. 

The same applies to shooting day costs – once a shift is over, you already owe the actors, stuntmen, lighting workers and other members of the crew the shooting day payments. Enter shooting day accruals after the end of the shooting day, and you will see the actual payables to contractors and the actual cost of the project in the Cost Estimate form. 

Remember that even if you do not make any payments, the cost of your project (and the payables) is growing every day, and it is the amount of accrued costs that allows you to estimate it most accurately.  It is the amount of accrued costs that must be compared to the planned costs to assess the financial status of the project. 

For your convenience, the system provides for several types of accrued costs:

- One-Off
- Shooting Day
- Periodic (Monthly)
- Periodic (Daily)

Monthly (Periodic) Accruals
These types of costs include salaries, fees, office/stage rentals and other expenses with the rate calculated per month (100,000 RUB per month). As soon as you have signed an agreement with someone with similar payment terms, enter the corresponding accrual to the system.

FilmToolz will calculate the project costs accrued to date on a daily basis by generating actual payables to the contractor. For example, if you rented an office for 100,000 RUB per month, today your debt will be 100,000/31 (if there are 31 days in a month) = 3,225.81 RUB; 6,451.61 on the next day, etc.

Note. As with this calculation method the system rounds off the accrued costs every day, the amount will be calculated not by dividing, but by subtracting previously accrued daily costs from 100,000 on the last day of the month, so eventually the amount will always be equal for the month.
It is not the case when you engaged someone to the project for the period from 15 February to 15 March (for the sake of argument, for a month) for 100,000 RUB, and the system calculates the amount of payables as 100,000 * 14/28 + 100,000 * 15/31 = 50,000 + 48,387 = 98,387 RUB. In this case, if this calculation does not satisfy you, you can manually add a One-Off accrual for the remaining amount of 1,613 RUB (so that the total payables is exactly 100,000). 

When adding monthly accruals, we do not recommend that you immediately indicate the end date of accruals, since the actual one usually differs from the planned one. Select Open Date and edit the corresponding accrual by changing the Open date to the actual closing date of the cost only when you are certain that the accrual is completed. Learn more in the accruals adding module. 

Daily Accruals
Similarly to monthly accruals, these are long-term costs, the value of which is linked to days. An example is a long-term stage rent (25,000 RUB per day). In other words, if you rented a stage for 1,000,000 per month, this is a monthly accrual. And if its value depends on the number of days in a month and is calculated on the basis of 25,000 RUB per day, this is a daily accrual. Add it to the system, and FilmToolz will daily add 25,000 RUB to the payables to the stage. 

Shooting Day Accruals are the costs linked to a certain shooting day (i.e. those that will not occur if there are no shooting days); Usual accruals include the shooting day fee of the crew (lighting workers, focus pullers, dolly grips, etc.), equipment lease (camera, lighting, etc.), vehicles, props and rental of locations. 

To enter bulk shooting day costs (taking the costs of the previous shooting day as a basis and copying/editing them), we have developed a dedicated form available on the Cost Estimate page through the Add costs (Shooting Day Accruals) menu. Learn more about this form in a dedicated module. 

The difference between a Shooting Day Accrual and One-Off Accrual is that it is included in relevant reports (on shooting day costs) and allows the system to better analyse the cost of relevant items exactly by historic/remaining shooting days. 

One-Off Accruals are any one-off costs that have nothing to do with shooting days, crew salaries, etc. In general, these are any costs. Payment for insurance, colour grading, purchase of music and scripts, etc. 

Adding Accruals
You can read more about adding accruals of different types in a separate module.