A Quarrytown production is a small company that exists for eleven weeks. It hires grips, electricians, set dressers, drivers and caterers, sometimes 480 of them, works them hard, and then disappears. Each production has its own budget and its own bank account, and until last year its own payroll house.
Simone Achterberg runs production finance. She describes the old wrap day as the worst day of a shoot. “Everyone is exhausted, everyone is leaving for the next job, and the one thing they all ask is when the last check comes. The honest answer was about a week.”
One treasury, an account per production
Quarrytown now runs each production from its own account inside one Pinnacle treasury. The studio funds it at the start of the shoot, sweeps the excess back each Friday, and closes it a month after wrap. Three productions ran at once this summer without their money ever touching.
Crew add their bank details and W-9 on their first day, through the same start paperwork they already fill in. On wrap day, the line producer submits final timecards, Simone's team approves one run, and the crew are paid that evening.
- 78% of crew bank where RTP reaches and are paid within seconds.
- Approvals over $200,000 need the line producer and the studio's CFO, each with a security key.
- Each production's journal lines post to its own class in the studio's ledger.
What it changed
The fees are the easy part to measure: about $0.50 per instant payout instead of the $18 per check the payroll house charged. The harder part to measure is reputation. Crew talk, and Atlanta's production community is small. Simone says the line she now hears most from returning crew is that Quarrytown is the one that pays on wrap day.
On wrap day the crew used to ask when they would be paid. Now they check their phones before the trucks are loaded.
Simone Achterberg
Head of Production Finance, Quarrytown Pictures
