For those of you who have used Movie Magic Budgeting and have had to create separate cost trackers using an Excel spreadsheet– you know what an absolute pain in the ass it is to transfer information from one document to another.
For those of you who have no idea what the heck I’m talking about let me briefly explain –I’ll try to make it painless.
Movie Magic is a budgeting tool many of us use to create budgets. But it’s not designed (even if they say it is) to keep track of your costs on a day-to-day basis. To keep track of costs, Line Producers typically create a separate cost tracker using an Excel spreadsheet (see my blog post on cost trackers). The problem is – we have to manually enter every single account code, line item, and description into the Excel spreadsheet. It’s not only a weekend time sucker ( no one really has time to do it while they are gearing up for production) it’s also fraught with the possibility of mistakes. There’s the potential to omit an entire line item, or possibly transpose numbers – instead of giving the Associate Producer a $250 day rate, she now makes $520, etc., etc.
There is an answer – praise the software geniuses – Showbiz Shark. It’s a software program that allows you to convert a Movie Magic budget to Excel in seconds with calculations and subtotals in place. It’s a Line Producer’s dream come true. For. Real. I’m not joking.
Thanks
thanks!