Bookkeeper for Video Production Companies

How do I track client deposits and retainers?

When a client sends a deposit, the money goes on the books as deferred revenue, not as income. You still owe them a deliverable, so the deposit sits on the balance sheet like a liability until the work is done.

We move it into income as you work. If we booked the whole deposit as income on the day it landed, the month you got paid would look rich and the months afterward would look empty. Most jobs follow the same shape: part of the money up front, the rest when you deliver, with the work in between.

Retainers work the same way. Not every studio charges a retainer, but if a client pays you monthly to keep you on call, some of that money covers work you have not done yet. We release it into income for the month it applies to, not the month the payment arrives.

What does a production job actually cost?

A production job carries several distinct lines of cost, and the shoot day is only one of them. The published pricing guides in the trade give this rough map:

A single commercial can range from $3,000 to over $50,000 depending on complexity, and a one-day shoot at a client's location often runs $3,000-$5,000 alone. The reason to list these lines is that the revenue is spread over the invoice, but the cost arrives across time: music, voice, color all solid months after the shoot.

What do video production books get wrong?

The most common problem is unpicked hours. A two-hour shoot can actually destroy four or five focus hours between the prep and the color grading, and twenty hours of post-production simply go off the invoice. The job looks profitable on paper and is a loss in real life, and the missing those hours is its own reason a next quote comes in low.

A second mistake is worker classification. Most of a set works are independent contractors with a 1099, but if the same crew returns for every project and the schedule runs like you hired an employee, the status can be disputed. Production companies that use the same crew repeatedly are a known audit trigger, and the books need to be clean enough to defend the contractor line.

The third is equipment. A camera, a lighting kit, or an edit suite is a capital asset, not an operating expense. You can write it off faster in the year of purchase, or spread it over several years, and which is better depends on the income you expect that year. Either way, the books need to carry the asset separately or the month you buy gear shows a loss that was never real.

Should I track every project separately?

Yes. Each project gets its own profit and its own costs, and the books keep them apart. Without that, a bank line says only "deposit received", and the business can't tell a $12,000 client came from a profitable corporate shoot or a low-billing event that ran over.

What this looks like in practice: every production is set up as its own job on the books, and everything that belongs to it attaches to that job, the crew times, the location fees, the music license, the editing time. Revenue sits next to cost for that single production. That is the basis of job the code.

When the books run this way, you get the decisions a production owner actually makes: which types of work to chase, which client to raise rates on, and which projects are losing money and should be bid differently or turned down. You cannot make those decisions with one lump sum for the whole year.

What reports should I look at?

The two that do the most work in a production business are a profit and loss per job and a budget against actuals per project. The overall P&L tells you whether the business made money in the month, but it cannot tell you which job actually made it.

Budget versus actual is the report the trade uses to keep a production honest. Before the shoot you have a budget, the crew days, equipment, travel, and a set of overs. Halfway through the job you compare what you planned against what you are actually spending. That shows at a glance that an edit overruns or a location cost is climbing, and sets a basis for change orders and re-pricing before the invoice.

Together, those reports decide the business: what a project's real margin comes out to, which job types are worth chasing, which type of client needs a rate increase, and whether the cash flow can make it over the holes in the schedule.

Does the Illinois film credit apply to my business?

It can. Illinois runs a production tax credit worth 35% of qualified Illinois spending, and it applies to commercials, branded content, streaming, and television, not just feature films. The dollar figure on the page can be substantial, but it is a tax calculation, not a bookkeeping one.

The home minimums are about qualified veteran instead of ... actually here are the conditions: at least $50,000 in qualified Illinois spending for a shorter production and $100,000 for a longer one, plus registration with the state's film office before principal photography. The thresholds change between budget cycles, so confirm against the state's current page rather than trust a 2026 recap.

The bookkeeping role is to support the claim. If the books attach every qualifying purchase, gear rentals, Illinois vendor invoices, all post labor, and available crew wages to the project, your tax accountant has what they need to make the credit. We do not file tax returns on our books, but preparing the documentation so the claim can be filed is where the bookkeeping work is.