Film Accounting Glossary
Burn rate
What is burn rate?
Also called daily burn, or spend rate.
Burn rate is how fast a production is spending, usually expressed per shooting day or per week.
Comparing burn rate against the remaining schedule is the quickest early warning that a picture will not finish on budget, often visible weeks before the formal cost report catches up. Transportation and picture-car departments watch it closely because idle vehicles and standby drivers burn money without generating footage.
Example
A show budgeted at $210,000 a shooting day is running $246,000 across the first eight days. With 22 days left, that pace projects roughly $790,000 over, and it is visible weeks before the formal cost report catches up to it.
Figures are illustrative, chosen to show the mechanics rather than to quote market rates.
Where you'll see it
Read daily off hot costs and weekly off the cost report. Usually the first number a line producer looks at.
Common mistake
Waiting for the weekly cost report to see it. Burn rate is visible in hot costs within days, and by the time the formal report agrees, a week of schedule is gone.
Related questions
- How do you calculate a production's burn rate?
- Divide cost incurred to date by shooting days completed, then compare that per-day figure against the budgeted per-day allowance and the days remaining.
- What burn rate signals a film will go over?
- Any sustained gap between actual and budgeted cost per shooting day. Extrapolated across the remaining schedule, a small daily gap becomes a large final variance.