Hot Costs: Overview, Detail and All Days

Hot Costs has three views, picked from the toggle at the top left: Overview, Detail, and All Days. All three read the IN, OUT and MPV cells on the PR Back, so the figures only change when somebody enters a time.

The top half repeats the day: scenes and pages against the script, the production report times from First Shot to Last Man, and the days grid. In the Cost Tracking table, four rows are calculated: Shooting Company Hours, Driver Hours, Overtime past the scheduled day, and Meal Penalties. Catered Meal Count is a head count of everyone with a call time on the PR Back, cast and background. Cast Costs, Standin Hours, Background Hours, 2nd Meal Costs and Additional Items take a Budgeted figure and a note from you. Their Actual column is not calculated yet and reads zero. Film & Lab is typed by hand.

One line per person: #, TITLE, NAME, IN, OUT, MPV, Work, Bud, Rate, Ovr(Undr), MP. Work is net hours and turns red when it runs past the scheduled day. Ovr(Undr) is what the day cost that person against what the scheduled day would have cost. It goes negative when they wrapped early. Click a name to open their card.

The left box covers hours: Hours worked, Scheduled hours, Overtime past the scheduled day, and hours past straight time. The right box covers overtime cost, rows without a rate, and meal penalties. The By day table has a row per shoot day, with the empty ones greyed. The Notes column shows what's missing. A day reads No production report yet, No OUT times on the report yet, or N rows without an OUT. Each note is a link. Click it to open that day's PR Back with the rows that need an OUT highlighted.

Hours run from IN to OUT. An OUT earlier than the IN is read as the next morning. The meal comes off: the row's own lunch out and in if the PR Back has them, otherwise the standard meal length from Globals. If the call sheet has a second meal, one more standard meal comes off every row. Overtime is banded. The first 8 hours are straight time. From 8 to OT Threshold 1 (12 by default) pays 1.5x. From Threshold 1 to Threshold 2 (14) pays 2x. Past that pays 3x. Crew and drivers have their own thresholds and multipliers in the Hot Cost Globals card. Drivers are the rows in the Transportation department. The thresholds are counted in worked hours from the start of the day, so 12 means the twelfth hour. The hourly rate is the person's own hourly rate if they have one. Otherwise it is backed out of their day rate across the scheduled day. A $700 day on a 12-hour scheduled day works out to $50 an hour, because the day pays 8 straight hours and 4 at time and a half. Somebody with no rate at all falls back to the Burn Rate crew day rate. With no fallback either, their hours count and their money does not.

Penalties come from the MPV cell on the PR Back. Hot Costs prices what you enter there. It doesn't work penalties out from the meal times. An entry like 2/1 means two penalties on the first meal and one on the second. A bare number counts against the first meal only. Each meal escalates on its own. The first penalty costs the 1st Meal Penalty rate, the second the 2nd rate, the third and any after it the 3rd rate. The defaults are $7.50, $10.00 and $12.50, set in Hot Cost Globals. So 2/1 costs $7.50 + $10.00 on the first meal and $7.50 on the second: $25.00.

Hot Costs is a Producer feature. An AD-level member on the show gets a lock screen. A producer who has switched on Scheduling Only in a DOOD sees the reports with the money taken out: hours, counts and penalties, no rates or dollars. Switch it off to bring the money back.