As entertainment companies look forward to 2017, what do they need from their corporate performance management film accounting software? Maintaining the books for a movie production can be a daunting task for an accountant due to challenges such as:
- Rapid spending during production: The amount of petty cash doled out per week can easily be in the range of $40,000 to $60,000, far more than in most other industries. This makes it harder to identify and address any cost overruns.
- Complex multi-entity structures: It is common for a different registered corporation to be set up for each movie produced. These entities are then charged numerous "distribution fees" by the studio.
- Auditing and tracking: Keeping up with all project-related expenses has become increasingly complicated with the emergence of incentives such as state tax credits for movie and content productions.
Any worthwhile CPM platform should offer solutions to these common industry-specific problems. It ought to make budgeting and forecasting as easy as possible by eliminating the redundant work and inefficient manual processes that set back many finance teams.
In practice, these three features can make all the difference in how a CPM solution functions:
1. Visibility into metrics and key performance indicators
Your entertainment firm may often need to juggle forecasts for multiple markets and productions. But this task is incredibly complicated if you lack insight into your costs and how they might ultimately affect profit margins. Your team will be delayed and struggle to come up with timely projections.
Software such as the Adaptive Suite is the answer to these troubles. It offers real-time visibility into key performance indicators so you can ensure your plans are built on accurate, up-to-date information. Superior knowledge of your expenses can also help you identify the costliest aspects of your projects and bring them under control.
Entertainment accounting has unique complexities.
2. Automated and effective reporting options
| "What if reporting could instead be automated and transformed into a wide array of customized options?" |
Reporting is the weak point of many budgeting and forecasting operations. Team members usually have to resort to legacy tools such as Microsoft Excel to run reports. This situation results in numerous delays as well as redundant data entry and the input errors that come with it.
What if reporting could instead be automated and transformed into a wide array of customized options? That is what the Adaptive Suite does for reporting. It dramatically reduces the report-building time each month by compiling data automatically. With many choices for design, your entertainment company can get reports that track your most relevant concerns, such as the costs of projects sorted by their titles, networks, and producers.
3. Fully integrated systems
Budgeting and forecasting for a complex movie production isn't easy if your systems for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and rights management are disconnected. Unfortunately, this is the reality for many firms.
The good news is that the Adaptive Suite enables straightforward integrations between multiple applications. You can bring everything together and get a comprehensive view of how a movie or other content project is progressing. With RKL' years of experience in the entertainment industry, you can also ensure that implementation, support, and ongoing training for the Adaptive Suite are all fully taken care of. Find out more about your options today.
