What a film timecard needs before payroll will take it
6 minute read
A timecard that says a gaffer worked Tuesday is not a timecard. Payroll needs to know which production it bills to, whether the person is an employee or a loan-out, what they are classified as, exactly when the day started and stopped, and on what basis they are paid. Miss one and the row comes back.
Identity and eligibility
Two questions, and the second is the one that gets skipped: who is this, and are they set up to be paid at all.
- Name and email, which is how the crew member is matched to an existing payroll record rather than created twice.
- Last four of the SSN, which is the matching key most providers use.
- Loan-out yes or no. A loan-out is paid as a company, which changes the tax treatment entirely.
- For a loan-out: the company name and the last four of the FEIN.
- W-9 and I-9 on file. These are yes or no flags on the production side, and a no is a stop rather than a warning.
Classification
Classification decides the rate floor, the dues and the account the cost lands in. It is four fields, and they are not interchangeable.
- Department, which drives the cost center and the approval route.
- Position, which is what the person actually did that day rather than their usual title.
- Union or guild, with the local where the agreement is local-specific, and the member ID alongside it.
- Cost center or account code, if the production codes below the department level.
Position and title diverge more often than people expect. A camera operator who worked a day as a second unit DP is paid as a second unit DP for that day, and the timecard is where that gets recorded.
The shape of the day
Call and wrap are the obvious two. The other three are where the money moves.
- Call, the time work started, not the time on the call sheet.
- Wrap, and a flag for whether the wrap landed on the following calendar day.
- Meal one and meal two, as minutes or as punches depending on the provider.
- Meal late, a flag for a break pushed past the agreed window, which is what a meal penalty is computed from.
- Day type, so a travel day, a holiday and a shoot day are not paid as though they were the same thing.
A post-midnight wrap needs its own flag rather than a second date field. The day is the work date, and the wrap belongs to it even though the clock has rolled over. Recording it any other way splits one day into two partial ones.
The money
- Pay rate, and the basis: daily, hourly or weekly. The number alone is ambiguous.
- Kit or box fee, usually a daily amount, and separate from the rate because it is taxed differently.
- Mileage, where the production reimburses it.
The three that get missed
Across the layouts payroll providers actually accept, three fields account for most of the back and forth: the rate basis, the loan-out FEIN, and the union local when only the member ID was captured. None of the three is hard to collect on the way in. All three are painful to chase a week later, once the crew member has moved to another production and stopped answering.
Questions
- Do we need the full Social Security number?
- Not for the export. The payroll provider holds the full number in its own records; the timecard import takes the last four to match against it.
- What if someone worked two positions in one day?
- That is two rows, not one, because the rate and often the account differ. Anything that forces one position per person per day will misstate one of them.
- Who is meant to fill this in?
- Split it. Identity, eligibility and classification belong to the crew member's profile and are entered once. Only the shape of the day changes daily, which is the part worth putting on a phone.