The budget is the blueprint.
Real-time collaboration, budget phases, industry templates, fringes, and custom PDF exports. From quick commercial estimates to features with thousands of line items.
Bring your team together
Production budgeting, expense tracking, credit cards, approvals, and cost reporting in one cloud platform for video production teams.
Real-Time Collaboration
Collaboratively build budgets with line items, rates, fringes, and actuals. Start from industry-standard templates — feature film, TV, commercial, and more.
| Contacts | # Qty | Unit | $ Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kelcy Moore | 3 | DAY | 30,065.24 |
| Freddy Trowill | 1 | WEEK | 10,000 |
| Jens Jacob | 1 | DAY | 0.00 |
| Brooke Dimsdale | 2 | HOUR | 50.00 |
| Alfredo Poulsum | 2 | DAY | 1,000.00 |
| Abbe Evers | 5 | DAY | 2,000.00 |
All Your Productions In One Place
Group projects into folders, switch between workspaces, and stay on top of multiple productions without losing context.
The Atom Splitter
Edited 20 minutes ago
Sand Kingdom
Edited 1 hour ago
Something Somewhere
Edited 3 hours ago
Centurion Rising
Edited 5 hours ago
White Smoke
Edited 1 day ago
Comments
Comment directly on line items or expenses, so context never gets lost.
Access Control
Control who can see, edit, and approve, so clients, vendors, and your team only access what they should.
Tailored
scenarios.
Segment budgets freely to your needs. Easily set up to compare different locations, versions, or phases of your production.
| Name | # Qty | Unit | $ Rate | $ Estimated | $ Actuals | Variance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Production Design | 1 | FLAT | 15,000 | 15,000.00 | 14,250.00 | |
| Director Fee | 1 | FLAT | 45,000 | 45,000.00 | 45,000.00 | |
| DP / Cinematographer | 5 | DAY | 950 | 4,750.00 | 3,800.00 | |
| Camera Operator | 5 | DAY | 550 | 2,750.00 | 2,750.00 | |
| Gaffer | 4 | DAY | 2,500 | 10,000.00 | 7,500.00 | |
| Location Sound | 3 | DAY | 4,500 | 13,500.00 | 9,000.00 | |
| Art Department | 2 | WEEK | 5,000 | 10,000.00 | 8,000.00 | |
| Wardrobe Stylist | 1 | FLAT | 9,500 | 9,500.00 | 7,125.00 |
More FeaturesIt doesn't stop here.
Enhanced Performance.
Time-saving shortcuts built for busy producers.
Account
⌘KInstant access with global search.
Currency
International Currency Support
Budget in any currency with live conversion rates. Shoot in London, post in Tokyo, report in USD. Every line item stays accurate across borders.
Automatic Fringes
Assign union fringes, workers’ comp, and payroll taxes per crew member. Rates cascade across all budget scenarios so nothing falls through the cracks.
Globals & Formulas
Define prep days, shoot days, and custom variables once. Reference them anywhere in your budget and watch totals update instantly when plans change.
Markups
Apply agency fees, production markups, or contingency as a percentage on any subtotal. Totals recalculate instantly — no formulas to maintain.
Overtime Hours
Base Hours
Overtime Rate
Overtime Calculator
Configure daily or weekly OT thresholds and rate multipliers per role. Regular hours and overtime split automatically so your labor costs are always accurate.
Tags
Label line items by department, phase, location, or shoot day. Filter and report on exactly the slice you need without restructuring your budget.
Keep notes
where the
numbers live.
Attach rich notes directly to every project: call sheet details, location logistics, crew instructions, or anything your team needs to reference. Formatted text, bullet points, and headings, right alongside your budget.
AICP, feature film, documentary, music video, branded content, and more. Start with a proven structure or build from scratch.
The same production finance layer used for budgeting, actuals, expense management, and payments.
Trusted across commercials, features, series, documentaries, music videos, and branded content.
Built for how production budgets actually work.
Spreadsheets were not designed for production finance. They break when teams collaborate, lose context when files get emailed, and force accounting to reconstruct what happened after the fact. Saturation was built from the ground up for production: every column, every workflow, every export.
REAL-TIME COLLABORATION
Stop emailing budget files back and forth.
Invite line producers, department heads, UPMs, and accounting into the same live budget. Everyone sees the same numbers. No version conflicts, no formula breakage, no file-naming nightmares.
ACCOUNT-BASED NAVIGATION
Your top sheet is a table of contents, not a prison.
Click into any account to see its sub-accounts and line items. Expand a line item into a full account when you need more detail. Collapse back to the top sheet when you need the big picture.
SCALES WITH YOUR PRODUCTION
One-page estimate or thousand-line feature. Same tool.
A photography gig with six lines, a commercial with standard AICP structure, a feature film with departmental sub-accounts — Saturation handles all of them without forcing you into a rigid format.
Jumpstart your projects
Utilize templates built from industry standards.
How production runs today
Producers juggle spreadsheets, email threads, disconnected accounting tools, and manual reports just to keep one production on track. Saturation replaces that stack with a single platform built for production finance.
The old way
With Saturation
Coming from one of these?
When building a second scenario means duplicating the whole file again, or it breaks when someone pastes over a formula, you already know the workarounds. Curious how Saturation handles the things your current tool can't?
Production budgeting without the production tax.
Every hour spent wrestling with Excel formulas, reconciling file versions, or rebuilding a budget PDF is time not spent running the show. Saturation removes the tax so producers can focus on the work.
CORE CAPABILITIES
Built to connect budgeting, actuals, and payments in one production finance platform.
That is the difference between a budgeting tool and a financial operating system for production.
What makes Saturation budgeting production-native.
These are the workflows that matter once a budget stops being a planning document and becomes the operating system for real production spend.
Reports that look as good
as your numbers.
Generate beautiful, branded PDFs directly from your budget in seconds. Pick from professionally designed templates: AICP bid forms, cost summaries, film budgets, or build your own from a blank canvas.
Project Reports
START FRESH
BUDGET
Film Budget
Standard film budget report
- ⚡One-click PDF export from any budget or scenario
- 🎨Drag-and-drop report builder with branded headers and logos
- 📋Start from AICP bid forms, cost summaries, or build your own
- 🔗Share a link or download — clients get exactly what they need
Over 8,500+ integrations
Connect spending, payments, and downstream reporting to the accounting, banking, and workflow tools your team already depends on.
QuickBooks
Xero
Plaid
Slack
Zapier
Google SheetsQuickBooksXeroPlaidSlackZapierGoogle Sheets
Wrapbook
Movie Magic Budgeting
Notion
Airtable
Asana
DropboxWrapbookMovie Magic BudgetingNotionAirtableAsanaDropboxBudgeting FAQs.
The questions producers, line producers, and UPMs ask when they are evaluating whether to move their budgets into Saturation.
Your next production deserves a budget that keeps up.
Start with a template or build from scratch. Invite your team. See the difference between a spreadsheet and a production finance platform in the first ten minutes.
Free tier available. No credit card required. SOC 2 compliant.
“Saturation.io is the kind of budgeting platform we producers have been begging for. No more outdated excel spreadsheets or algorithm crunching needed.”
Candice Guevara
Line Producer
Spreadsheets and legacy software vs. Saturation
See what changes when you move your production finances to a platform built for the industry.
Budgets locked in Excel files emailed back and forth
Live cloud budgets accessible by your whole team in real time
Manual formula errors break cost reports overnight
Automated actualizing with zero formula maintenance
Importing from Movie Magic takes hours of reformatting
Import directly from Movie Magic in seconds
No visibility into spend until invoices arrive after wrap
Real-time spend tracking from first day of prep to cost report
Fringes, overtime, and tax incentives calculated by hand
Built-in calculators for fringes, OT, and tax incentives