Business

To support the entertainment industry’s compliance with new industry guidelines for paperless, contact-free productions, and to enable a remote workforce, Entertainment Partners launched the first fully-digital, secure production finance solution to onboard talent and crew, enable mobile-digital timecards and manage digital purchase orders along with full integration with production accounting software and payroll services.

Entertainment Partners’ Production Finance Studio brings the new technology and military-grade security that will allow the industry to ramp up with safe, compliant, paperless productions.

The Production Finance Studio includes new integrations between EP’s industry-leading SmartStart, SmartTime and Smart Accounting tools for seamless data flow through the production finance process and real-time access to all production finance data anytime, at the studio, on location or when working remotely. And EP is introducing SmartPO, the new digital purchase order tool which replaces the paper-heavy purchase order process with digital functionality. Unlike point solutions loosely pieced together, the fully connected Production Finance Studio allows data to be entered once and become accessible through each digital product and every stage of production for streamlined workflows, improved accuracy and immediate access to crucial information. Point solutions require data to be entered multiple times risking errors, security breaches, missing information, duplication of tasks and delays from waiting for manual interventions.

“Our absolute focus over the last six months has been getting the industry back to production safely by helping our clients accelerate their digital adoption and providing them with the tools they need,” said Entertainment Partners’ President and CEO, Mark Goldstein. “We are thrilled to bring the Production Finance Studio to the industry, integrating our industry-leading tools which have been used on thousands of productions over the last 10 years along with the digital Purchase Order tool that the industry urgently needs in one fully digital, paperless, cloud-based solution.”

SmartPO, released this month after rigorous beta testing, is an all new digital purchase order solution that allows production professionals to securely create, manage, track, and approve all production purchase orders digitally, removing the need for paper. SmartPO offers flexibility for productions to configure their own PO approval workflows based on category, amounts or thresholds, and unlike competing solutions, SmartPO doesn’t leave users blind to the status of their purchase orders. Users can easily see the current status of all the POs they have permissions to view at a glance and can export reports into Excel if needed. Because it is part of an integrated system and directly linked with SmartAccounting, all financial data is always synced and up-to-date, providing a single source of truth for production finance.

In addition, Entertainment Partners will be adding enhancements to the Production Finance Studio including new integrations, multi-approver capabilities and custom approval workflows in the next version of SmartTime, which is currently in early release and will be available in the coming months.

The Production Finance Studio is designed with pressure-tested technology and military-grade data security. EP’s full cyber security team oversees advanced product and internal protections, including data encryption in cloud-based storage to ensure data is safe both in transit and at rest. EP’s processes are ISO-certified, the top benchmark for security program validation. And EP’s SmartID provides an additional level of security through a single, consistent and simple login experience across all EP tools.

“Entertainment Partners was the first to bring digital solutions to production finance and management, and today we are the only one that provides a secure, end-to-end, seamless, integrated solution across the arc of production to help the industry comply with the new guidelines,” said Goldstein.