Film budget templateA film budget template: a real top sheet, by account.

The sample, and the download

Sample data: Midnight Diner, our demo production (7 scenes, 2 1/8 pages, 4 shoot days). The CSV opens in Excel and Google Sheets. Replace the rows with your own.

How to fill it in

1. Start with the accounts, not the totals: story and rights, producers, director, cast, production staff, then camera, grip, art, wardrobe and the rest.
2. Price people from their deals: a day rate times the days they work, plus prep and wrap days, overtime and fringes.
3. Price things from the breakdown: every prop, vehicle and location gets a line.
4. Add contingency last, as a percentage of everything above it.
5. Lock the budget when it is approved, and log every change after that with a reason.

These are demo numbers, not a benchmark

Midnight Diner is a demo production with 44 people on its crew list. The figures show how a top sheet reads. They are not what a film of your size costs, so replace every number.

Do it in Spring Pro, where the budget follows the schedule

In Spring Pro the budget is built from the same crew list, schedule and breakdown. A crew member is one cost per day they work, so adding a day to the schedule changes the number. Rentals that run every shoot day follow the number of days.

Lock it when it is approved, and every later change to an estimate is logged with who made it, what changed, by how much and why. Expenses are approved, rejected and marked paid in the same project.