The entertainment industry is going through a significant period of change as it continues to find its way forward in the post-strike consolidated reality. 

Being in an industry currently navigating uncertainty in the present, it is natural to ask questions about the future and where things could be headed. 

One such question I’m often asked is, “How do you think entertainment payroll is going to evolve in the next few years?”

Even as the founder and CEO of an innovative, digital-first production accounting and payroll software platform, it isn’t a question that’s particularly easy to answer.

Predicting the evolution of any industry can be a difficult prospect, particularly during periods of significant technological, societal, and geopolitical change. 

To get a grasp of how entertainment payroll might evolve, you have to first look to the past and to see how we’ve arrived at the present. 

GreenSlate’s simple early proposition

One of the ways innovation can come to fruition is by simply recognizing an opportunity and acting upon it. The impact and recognition might not even present itself until the big picture starts to come together over time. 

Before founding GreenSlate, I was a production accountant in the ‘90s, fully in the weeds working on productions small and large. 

I started John Finn Associates (JFA) where I hired and trained production accountants, and we used our competitors' platforms, and we were their customer. I recognized and lived first hand their lack of tech sophistication and quality of service. 

After accumulating years of experience, the opportunity I recognized that sparked the founding of  GreenSlate (FKA Indiepay) was not platform specific or initially tied to better service (though those were components.) The spark was around the pricing model that was offered at the time. 

We managed to initially disrupt the production payroll space with Indiepay because prior to us, it had only been accepted that the entertainment payroll companies were the employer of record (EOR). An EOR is a legal entity that legally employs workers on behalf of another business.  

The EOR model has been the accepted practice in the industry for the past fifty years. Because the entertainment space is freelance and there are many single purpose entities (SPEs) created for each production, it can make sense in some cases to use the EOR model for the sake of simplicity on behalf of the production. 

The producer would never want to take on the added burden of managing unemployment insurance and worker’s comp claims on their own, so it was always sold to them that the payroll companies would take on all those administrative burdens and let the producer focus on creating. 

This makes total sense. 

However, I also noticed that this was very specific to the entertainment industry, yet outside of that industry, regular day to day businesses must handle all of those items themselves. That is where GreenSlate could play a different role by not acting as the typical EOR, but we would act as the agent for the production and use the production’s federal ID number to remit payroll taxes on their behalf.

By acting as the agent for the production instead of the EOR, we were able to realize significant savings in the State Unemployment Insurance (SUI) rates as well as the fees for worker’s compensation insurance.  

The reason being is that each producer was setting up a new entity for each production - the SPE.  Since it was a new entity with no payroll history, those SPEs would then be entitled to the new employer rate for SUI in each state.  This created significant savings to the producer compared to what the EOR payroll companies were charging, which was the maximum in each state.

It wasn’t a revolutionary concept...outside of the entertainment industry.

This is how most companies outside of the entertainment business operate. 

This meant GreenSlate could save costs for productions that would make a meaningful difference for their bottom line. When a production could save $50,000 (or more!), that money could instead be reallocated back into production and could equate to what might be a full day of shooting on certain productions. 

It was astonishing nobody had considered this, much less acted on providing a viable solution. 

The value was clear and simple to understand, especially when you added the production accounting services we were also providing - it was an easy choice for the producer.

It was a great offering for productions that helped establish GreenSlate. This offering paired with the already exceptional service and the eventual release of a superior digital platform, cemented GreenSlate’s longevity.

Push the present to evolve into the future

Even when there is clear value to be had, there’s an entrenched stubbornness that has persisted in the  entertainment industry culture, and the production accounting and payroll space has been no different.

Lagging behind and sticking to “traditional” ways of doing things has always been a hurdle, one which usually only gets lept over when there is major disruption like the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes…or a global pandemic. 

Over the years Indiepay evolved and adapted and we eventually rebranded to GreenSlate in 2017. The name better reflected what had become a major objective of our company, which was a focus on a paperless, digital first, all-in-one platform that brings productions into the present and shows them that there is a better, more efficient, cost-effective, and service-geared way of doing production accounting and payroll. 

The onset of COVID-19 and the global pandemic was the driving factor which pushed productions to truly start moving beyond many of the old ways and embrace digital at a speed which would have been unthinkable pre-pandemic.

Mainly because they had to. 

During the pandemic, if a studio wanted a production to get made, the set had to be safe, COVID experts had to be present to make sure people were social distancing and they didn’t want people there who didn’t have to absolutely be there. 

With people being encouraged to be remote, GreenSlate was already at the forefront of being a digital solution. We had a massive head start from our efforts to be more environmentally friendly by ditching the paper for digital. 

The entertainment industry, overall, has accepted this digital reality for the most part and our competitors by and large have caught up out of necessity. That said, I would consider their digital approach a rather hackneyed one, as they are trying to recreate the paper experience within the digital world.

Remote work became necessary, now it is an accepted way of working where many production teams realize there are benefits to be had by having their production accounting teams working remotely. 

Now we are seeing the push and pull between those who prefer to work remotely and those who put a higher value on teams collaborating in person on productions. There are benefits to each, and this dynamic will continue to play out over time, but I see those teams who learn to adapt to working remotely and trust their teams to deliver on their KPIs regardless of being physically present will eventually win the day. 

Leadership, in particular, needs to trust that the work will get done even if they can’t see the process of the work being done. What matters is that it gets done. 

But for some getting past the ability to physically see the work can be a challenge. Even though a producer has the capability to duplicate digital records in GreenSlate and save them as PDFs on their own systems, there’s still some old school mentality to print them out and store them. 

Over time, that mentality is shifting as more people realize how impractical it is compared to being fully digital. 

The increasing importance of cost savings will only accelerate

We’ve seen how the move into the digital present has saved our client productions money by eliminating unnecessary costs on items like office supplies (paper, ink, etc.) and physical storage costs of archived documents. 

While those savings help, they’re only a part of the cost savings that can, and will be, leveraged now and into the future. 

Production houses and studios that smartly apply cost-saving measures they learned during tight times, as remote work and digital gained acceptance, will be better positioned to consistently optimize their budgets over time.

This is important because content budgets are facing scrutiny as the industry finds its footing in a post-strike environment and new market reality.

Human efficiency plays a key role in cost savings, and will continue to do so. The nature of progress is that some human tasks become redundant and others gain importance as technology changes and new ways of working are discovered and adopted.

Imagine the savings: In a fully digital accounting environment, non-union administrative positions like filing clerks, could become obsolete. For a production with a 10-week shoot, eliminating the need for such positions could save $1,000 per week (plus fringes). Multiply that across numerous productions, and the cumulative financial benefits are significant.

But it’s not just about the money saved on redundancy for certain roles; it’s also about what it allows those in production accounting and other departments on set to focus on instead.

Where there is change, there is also opportunity. Here is the good news: smart productions can help build out the talents, capabilities, and careers faster for people who would have filled those roles, enabling them to do higher-value work. 

Work life balance also improves for the production accounting teams because they are working smarter, not harder. They literally save hours of work per week by using the GreenSlate application. Some can even go home by 6 pm, even while working during production! Based on my experience, a happy crew is a productive crew. 

The cost savings also start to pile up when considering the increased efficiency of those people who are integral to production accounting and payroll on a production. 

Accountants no longer need to be sitting around waiting for checks to be signed or chasing missing paperwork from crew members. Whether they are remote or on location, they will be increasingly able to use their time to contribute in more valuable ways such as analyzing numbers or doing projections rather than wasting their time saying, “Hey, can you sign these checks once you’re free?” 

They also won’t be wasting their time chasing paperwork from crew members. Instead, they can ensure the production’s expenses are properly tracked per the budget or they can ensure accuracy for vital reporting like tax credits and insurance claims.

These are “soft savings” because a production is still paying them to be there, but they’re actually making the most of their time. 

Looking beyond improving efficiencies of the team, cost savings will advance as more production companies start to look at and understand the data they collect over multiple productions over the course of time. 

Say for example a mid-sized production company does 10 projects a year, and GreenSlate is working with them for all of those productions fully. Then across all 10 of those projects they would have the ability to look at vendor data…who they are, the deals made, the total expense. They’ll get the holistic clarity of what they are paying a vendor across projects, which would give better insight into how to strike the most appropriate deals with vendors in the future. 

Better access to data across multiple projects allows production companies to make better decisions. 

With GreenSlate we are working very hard to help production companies put themselves into positions to make the best decisions possible for their financial health now and into the future. 

The role AI could play in production finance

We’ve seen an explosion of AI erupt into the public consciousness over the last two years as the technology advances exponentially. 

Like with any new potentially disruptive technology, we are looking at the ways in which AI will influence the entertainment industry and our space within it. 

There’s a lot to be said about AI, and I plan on sharing more about it in the future, but for now one of the immediate impacts I could see it having is around reading invoices to help with data entry. 

Where you have tasks like data being entered into a form, that’s a natural place where AI would make sense to incorporate and allow an accountant or payroll specialist to focus on other things that rely on human analysis and decision making. 

For example, if a crew member has entered data into the system and he types “camera rental,” AI could know that it applies to a certain code number because it can read “camera rental” and has been trained to understand the context of that entry. 

AI is not going to replace people, but it will likely play a role in helping do the tasks like coding and allowing accountants to focus on verifying the coding and the overall more important task of managing the budget.

As we consider these advancements, it's crucial to remain vigilant about the risks that come with AI integration, as precision and data quality will be paramount to ensuring that our financial records remain accurate and reliable; I could see AI potentially playing a role like this in our software eventually, but only within our platform and not by taking data from external sources.

Implementation of geolocation data could reduce timecard creation burdens

Timecards in the production business, digital or otherwise, have long been a source of possible consternation and even contention at times. 

As a point in fact, I’ve personally seen somebody put in a timecard saying they worked 24 hours in one day.

That’s just not possible, (physically.)

If geolocation was in place, would that person have submitted a timecard saying they worked 24 out of 24 hours in the day? I find it highly doubtful. Why? Because if geolocation was in place, the person would not be able to submit a timecard for 24 hours, because they would have had to leave to eat or go home and sleep. 

That said, if someone was allowed to work 24 hours in a day, I would be very worried about that person and the production! 

Will there always be people who try to find ways to add hours and be dishonest with their hours? 

Of course. 

Will a tool like geolocation completely eliminate graft? 

Of course not.

But it could be a strong tool to help cut back on misuse and improve the accuracy and efficiency of timecard submissions.

There are union considerations that come into play in this area, which would likely be a complicating factor towards making geolocation or biometrics a reality for union productions. 

But not every single production is union, so there’s more room to look at the viability of something like geolocation with those types of productions. 

And like with launching the company on the back of a pricing model that made sense to productions, followed by going fully digital - which took a pandemic to kick the industry into the present - adoption can and does happen. The same could possibly be said for geolocation. 

There’s always going to be a hurdle that needs to be overcome, it’s just a matter of time until it’s eventually cleared. So it’s always best to be looking ahead and working towards solutions regardless of how many you might have already solved in the past. 

The march for progress will continue

Looking back on what we’ve been able to accomplish with GreenSlate and how we’ve consistently positioned ourselves to meet the needs and demands of productions regardless of size, I can say with confidence that the future of entertainment payroll is bright despite the obvious challenges. 

Despite periodic institutional resistance to new technologies, new ways of working, strikes, pandemics, recessions, or just plain stubbornness, this industry is filled with absolutely brilliant, creative, and motivated people. 

Whether those people are the accountants forming the backbone of finance teams, studio leadership, producers, cast and crew, or anybody else, there is one goal and one mission:

To tell the most entertaining stories imaginable. 

A miracle of moving parts and people have to come together to tell these stories, and despite how much things evolve, there is always at the core ensuring people are paid fairly, efficiently, and with care.

At GreenSlate we’ve positioned ourselves (with success) to do just that since the very beginning, and will continue to do so because we embrace what the future holds and we always will.