FilmBase 1.2: rate cards that actually know the rates

Every production budget is mostly people, and every person on it has a rate. A daily rate, usually. But also a weekly that isn’t just five dailies, an overtime multiplier, a kit rental, a per diem, travel days at a different rate, hold days at another. That deal lives in someone’s head, an email thread, and three slightly different spreadsheet cells.

Version 1.2 gave it a home. We called it the Ratebook.

From rate card to line item, without retyping

The core of 1.2: assign a rate from a central rate card directly onto a budget line item. The line picks up the daily, weekly, or monthly rate and calculates from there. Each line also remembers how its rate was derived, so when the quantity changes from 6 days to 2 weeks, the maths follows the deal instead of clinging to a stale number.

Per-contact rate cards plug into the same flow. Your gaffer’s card carries their snapshot rates and their fringes onto every line they appear in.

And the whole thing is undoable. Import a rate, reassign a card, change your mind, Ctrl+Z. Every affected field comes back: snapshot rates, calculation mode, applied fringes, all of it. Budget edits you can’t reverse are budget edits people are scared to make.

The fields a real deal memo has

Crew deals are layered: daily, weekly, and monthly rates, hold, travel, rehearsal and fitting rates, overtime, kit rental, per diem, housing, and transport, plus contract type, dates, and notes. Rate cards in 1.2 carry all of it. If it’s on the deal memo, there’s a field for it.

Fringes, finally first-class

Fringes live next to the work in 1.2: a fringes panel right on the Project Rate Cards page, and reusable fringe definitions at the library level, scoped per folder so your South African crew fringes don’t leak into your UK template.

Fringe state is per card: change one card’s fringes and no other card moves, and a card dropped into a new folder brings its fringes along.

A library you can keep tidy

The rate card library was rebuilt as a single tree: folders and cards together, drag a card between folders, right-click for rename, duplicate, delete. Cards travel with their fringes when you move or export them, as native .fbrc files or CSV.

None of this is glamorous. It’s plumbing. But the gap between “the budget” and “the deals we actually made” is where overages hide, and 1.2 was about closing it.

Thanks for using FilmBase. Got a rate structure our cards can’t hold? Tell us: [email protected]