Per diem should not be a spreadsheet

It's the Sunday before a five-day location shoot. The UPM is at a kitchen table with a stack of cash, a bank envelope per department, and a spreadsheet that lists 40 names, a daily rate, travel days at half, and a column called "notes" that already has six asterisks in it. Someone's flight got moved, two PAs were added Friday night, and the DP is per diem-exempt but nobody told the coordinator. By the time the envelopes are sealed, the math is already wrong — and the only record that it was ever right lives in one file on one laptop.

Per diem is supposed to be the simplest money on a production: a flat daily amount so cast and crew can eat and get around on location without filing for every sandwich. It is also, on most shows, the messiest — because the tools are a spreadsheet, a stack of twenties, and a guess at the right rate. None of those survive contact with a real call sheet.

Why the spreadsheet breaks

The spreadsheet isn't the problem because spreadsheets are bad. It's the problem because production per diem is a moving target and a spreadsheet is a frozen snapshot — and on location, someone touches the schedule every day.

• Travel and partial days: most shows pay a reduced rate on fly days and a full rate on shoot days, and the line between them moves when a flight slips.
• GSA-rate guesswork: people pull a federal per-diem rate for the city, eyeball it against the budget, and land on a number that's defensible in theory and arbitrary in practice.
• Headcount churn: dayplayers and last-minute swing crew arrive after the envelopes are stuffed, so the spreadsheet and the cash never agree.
• Exemptions and overlaps: loan-outs, agency-billed talent, and anyone on a hotel meal plan shouldn't draw the same per diem, but the spreadsheet doesn't enforce that.
• No live trail: once cash leaves the envelope it's untraceable, so the only proof of who got paid what is a file nobody can audit at wrap.

Every one of these is survivable on its own. Stacked across a five-week shoot with three locations, they turn into short-pays, awkward conversations on set, and a petty-cash reconciliation the production accountant dreads.

Put per diem on a controlled card

The fix is boring in the best way: stop moving cash and stop maintaining a phantom tab. Load each person's film per diem onto a controlled card tied to the project, capped at the daily amount, coded to the right department and budget line from the first dollar. The rate is set once by a named person — the UPM or production accountant — who approves the load on the production's own funds. Nobody is handing out envelopes, and nobody is reverse-engineering the spreadsheet at wrap.

• Set the rate per person and per day — full on shoot days, reduced on travel days — and let the cap enforce it instead of a formula.
• Approve the load in one place: a real person signs off on who gets per diem and how much before any money moves.
• Code it on the way out, so per diem hits the project budget under the right line the moment it's spent, not after someone retypes a receipt.
• Adjust mid-shoot when a dayplayer is added or a travel day shifts, without re-sealing an envelope or emailing a new version of the file.
• Keep it substantiated: each card shows what was loaded, spent, and left, so the per-diem total is audit-ready instead of a mystery.

Why this travels past film

Per diem isn't a film quirk — it's how any project pays people who are away from home on the company's clock. A touring crew on a 30-city run lives on it; an events team building a stage in another city draws it; a campaign shoot or a creator studio sending a four-person crew out for a week needs the same daily allowance, the same rate someone owns, and the same record that closes cleanly. Productions just feel it most acutely — high headcount, short windows, constant travel — but the shape is identical everywhere, which is the whole point of treating a project like the temporary company it is. One honest note on what this is and isn't: Alador is in private beta, coming in 2026, and is not a bank — banking and cards are provided through an FDIC-insured partner bank, and every dollar of per diem moves on the production's own funds with a named person approving it, not credit and not an advance, just the company's money, capped, coded, and accounted for. That's a better deal than a stack of envelopes and a spreadsheet that was wrong before the shoot even started.