Money made simple

In partnership with Soldo

Receipts may seem like insignificant details while you’re in the whirlwind of a film production, but lose enough of them and suddenly a huge chunk of your budget has disappeared in lost VAT claims.  If you’re working on a small production, it may be down to a producer to keep track of spending, which is easier said than done with hundreds of other urgent tasks keeping them on their toes. This can lead to the all-too-common dilemma of either spending time on accounting that is needed elsewhere, or not giving finances the attention they need and losing crucial money as a result. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what the best plan of action is.

Speaking at Raindance Film Festival last November, Carlo Gualandri, CEO of Soldo, acknowledged that accounting may not be the most glamorous aspect of the film industry, but that it’s certainly one of the most essential. “Money is the enabling and the limiting factor in most things – it needs to be in the right place to make things happen,” he explained. “We at Soldo aren’t trying to be in any way as cool as the movies and premieres [that we’ve seen at the festival], but we recognise the fact that behind every cool thing, you need to move money to enable it to happen.”

With Soldo, you can assign budgets to different departments using prepaid company cards. Simply hand the cards to the relevant teams and the accounting starts as soon as the spending does: records are automatically stored for each payment, showing when, where and how the money was spent, and a photo of a receipt is required to confirm each transaction. Soldo offers account management flexibility in seconds, with daily spend and maximum transaction limits which can be set individually for each card. Want to give talent their per diem allowances without a run to the cashpoint each morning? Simply deposit their full allowance onto their Soldo card and cap their daily spend, or just as easily make a daily transfer from your main Soldo account.

Cool things can happen on any scale, even within your own home. Gualandri spoke about how his own family operated as a testing ground during the early days of Soldo, with his children’s pocket money topped up each month on their individual prepaid cards: “The concept is the same regardless of scale; small or large, you can put money in the place it needs to be spent and then track everything that is happening.” Appropriately, given his film festival audience, Gualandri went on to compare the banking world to Mike Myers’ comedy character Austin Powers, frozen in time, existing today with the same outdated attitudes to technology. But with Soldo, he’s bringing it right up to date. As Austin would say: “Yeah, baby!”

In 2021, the Raindance Film Festival used Soldo to manage its finances for the first time, and the festival production team was delighted by the transformation. Soldo allowed Raindance to quickly create departmental accounts and see a detailed record of all spending, showing exactly where its money went. Says David Martinez, festival producer: “It was so easy to send the specific budgets to each department and for them to use their cards; we were able to track every single expense on the platform.”

Elliot Grove, Raindance founder, enthused about the time and effort that Soldo saved him: “Every year during Raindance, at accounts time, I used to have a nightmare, tearing my hair out over boxes and piles of receipts. Before Soldo, we spent two days per quarter going through receipts; Soldo has saved hours and hours every single month. And if anything gets your creativity going, it’s not having to worry about where the money went.”

For the rest of the Raindance team, Soldo made sorting their expenses fast and straightforward. Gone was the need to use money out of their own accounts, fill out an expenses form and wait for reimbursement; no longer did they have to worry about having to carry around wads of cash. If they needed money for an urgent purchase, it was as simple as the click of a button to have the money transferred to their Soldo card, with no stress at all.