Smart Suggestions

How Suggestions Appear

Whenever your project has an entity — a crew member, a location, a character, or a wardrobe piece — that isn’t yet linked to a budget line, the budget surfaces it as a ghost row: a dimmed, dashed row inside the department it belongs to. The Top Sheet Summary flags each such department with an amber “+N unbudgeted” badge so you can see at a glance where suggestions are waiting.

Ghost rows are proposals, not commitments — they don’t count toward any total until you add them.

Team Member Suggestions

For each crew member not yet in the budget, the suggestion:

1. 1Uses the day rate set for that person’s crew position on this project (or $0 if no rate is on file).
2. 2Sets the × multiplier to your total shoot days (the count shown in the shoot-days badge).
3. 3Files it under the matching department — Camera, Art, Sound, Electrical and so on — based on the member’s department, defaulting to Production Staff.

So a gaffer whose position day rate is $450, on a 15-day shoot, appears as a ghost $450 × 15 = $6,750 line in the Electrical department.

Location Suggestions

For each location that isn’t budgeted yet, the suggestion lands in the Locations department and:

1. 1Uses the location’s daily rate as the rate.
2. 2Estimates the days needed from the total script pages set at that location (roughly 3 pages per day), never fewer than 1 day, and uses that as the multiplier.

Character and Wardrobe Suggestions

Unbudgeted characters appear as flat ghost rows in the Cast department, and unbudgeted wardrobe pieces appear in the Wardrobe department, labelled with the piece and its character. These come in at a $0 flat rate because there’s no rate to infer — they’re placeholders to remind you to price them. Add the row, then fill in the rate.

Adding a Suggestion

Click anywhere on a ghost row (or its + icon) to add it. It converts into a normal line item — with the entity linked behind the scenes — and immediately counts toward the department and Grand Total. Once added, the suggestion disappears from the list, and the department’s “+N unbudgeted” badge ticks down. From there the line is fully editable: adjust the rate, multiplier, unit, or actuals like any other.

There’s no separate “dismiss” step — a suggestion simply stays available until you either add it to the budget or remove the underlying entity from the project.

Keeping Suggestions Accurate

Because crew suggestions multiply by your total shoot days, generate your schedule first so that count is real — with no shoot days yet, crew multipliers come through as zero. Likewise, assign scenes to their locations so the page-count estimate for location days has something to work from. Set day rates on your crew positions and daily rates on your locations, and the suggested amounts arrive already close to right.