There’s a particular kind of chaos that happens on every production, usually sometime between wrap and midnight. It’s when the daily time sheets are due, and suddenly everyone’s scrambling—ADs texting crew members for their hours, accountants chasing down PDFs via email, and production coordinators trying to piece together who worked what and when. It’s messy. It’s time-consuming. And until recently, it was just how things worked.
Now there’s a different option. Daily Times is a new GreenSlate feature built to take that scramble out of the equation—pulling time entry, approvals, and reporting into one workflow so productions can finally get clean data without the late‑night chaos.
The real issue isn’t just data entry—it’s accuracy, efficiency, and the ripple effect that messy daily times have on everything downstream. When your hot costs are delayed because production reports are a mess, that's a producer problem. When you're spending hours going back and forth via text and email to correct time entries, that's everyone's problem.
Time entry should be binary and clear, not a debate or a scavenger hunt across inboxes and message threads. “Time entry is verifiable as either in the system or not,” one production accountant noted, eliminating those frustrating disputes over whether someone submitted their hours via text or email.
That’s exactly the gap GreenSlate Daily Times feature is designed to close: one place to enter, review, and correct time so accounting, production, and crew are finally looking at the same information.
Daily Times is built for the people who live in the numbers every day: payroll accountants and department heads managing large volumes of entries. Bulk entry and bulk updates for hours, meals, accounts, and codes let teams handle entire departments at once instead of clicking through each individual crew member.
Teams have already shaved significant time off their daily workflow by using Daily Times to complete both timecards and Daily Time Sheets (DTS) in one flow. Exporting DTS for email or internal workflows is simple, and the familiar “DTS” language and layout matter to accountants and field teams who rely on those reports every day.
Producers may not be the ones keying in time, but they feel the impact of messy or delayed data more than anyone. For producers, the payoff is faster, cleaner hot costs—getting to those noon numbers without waiting on fixes from half a dozen channels.
Because Daily Times keeps everyone in the same system, the production report becomes a living document instead of a delayed snapshot. That gives producers, line producers, and finance better visibility into where the money is going, which is especially critical on fast‑moving shows and unscripted projects where cash flow is front and center. For unscripted productions that typically submit times weekly, the feature opens up possibilities for better cash flow management and more accurate cost tracking throughout production.
Crew adoption can be a concern: no one wants a system that feels like extra work or like they’re doing accounting’s job. Productions can tackle that by framing Daily Times as a shift in where crew enter what they’re already required to submit, not an additional task: one place, one process, fewer headaches.
Daily Times leans on familiar patterns—like “copy from” functions and weekly timecard flows—so crew can enter time daily without changing how they think about their week. With clear visual cues when changes are made, including visible indicators on draft timecards, crew get more transparency and more confidence that their time is being handled correctly.
Timecards are not just about math; they are legal records. GreenSlate makes it easy for employees to approve time after any edits so productions can stay aligned with guild and state requirements.
Daily Times also respects how different productions actually run. Crew can enter their own time, or department heads and payroll can handle it centrally, with access controlled by divisions so people only see what they should. For specialized needs like SAG Exhibit G, dedicated tools and full day‑type support are a game changer for teams handling complex union payroll.
Daily Times isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. It’s designed to finally make the wheel roll smoothly. It’s about having everyone on the same system, working with the same data, and eliminating the back‑and‑forth that eats up time and introduces errors.
When your hot costs are delayed because production reports are a mess, that's a producer problem. When you're spending hours going back and forth via text and email to correct time entries, that's everyone's problem. Daily Times gives productions a way out of that cycle.
At the end of the day, production is chaotic enough. Your time tracking doesn’t have to be.
Ready to see what your days look like without the midnight scramble? Talk to sales or email digitalsuccess@greenslate.com to turn on Daily Times for your next show—and turn one of production’s biggest pain points into one of its biggest advantages.