What Is a Film Budget Top Sheet?
A top sheet is the one-page summary at the front of a film budget. It shows the totals for each account group, above the line, below the line, post and other, and the grand total.
Also called: budget top sheet · budget summary
What it summarizes
A film budget runs to hundreds of line items across numbered accounts. Nobody reads it end to end. The top sheet collapses it to group totals so a producer or a financier can see where the money sits on one page.
It is the page that gets sent out. The detail underneath is where the work happens.
Budgeted, committed, actual, variance
A top sheet showing only the budgeted figure tells you what you intended in week one. A useful one carries four columns: budgeted, committed through purchase orders, actually spent, and the variance between them.
Without the committed column you find out a department has overspent when its invoices land, which is usually a couple of weeks after you could have done anything about it.
