The method,
given away.

Here is a Tuesday I have had more than once. The shoot is Thursday. The client emails to move the call an hour later. I reply, agree it, and put it in my calendar. The producer picks it up from the email thread and messages the crew WhatsApp group. The DoP sees it. The sound recordist is on another job and does not. The call sheet went out on Monday as a PDF and still says 07:00, because a PDF cannot know anything. On Thursday morning two people arrive at seven, three arrive at eight, and the location contact — who was told nothing, because he was never in the group — unlocks at half past.

Nobody was careless. Every single person acted on the best information they had. The information was simply held in six places, and changing one of them changed nothing else.

A record is not a place where information is stored. It is the place a value is allowed to be changed.

That distinction is the whole chapter, and honestly it is most of the book. Storage is easy — we all have Drive, we all have a folder per job. What almost nobody has is a rule about authority: for any given fact about a production, which single location is permitted to be wrong, so that everything else can be corrected from it.

Six copies of a call time

Take the call time in that story and count where it lived: the client's email, my calendar, the WhatsApp group, the crew's individual calendars, the PDF call sheet, and the sound recordist's memory. Six copies. When one moved, five were silently wrong, and there was no mechanism anywhere in that system to know it.

Now hold the same shoot in a system with a record. The call time is one field on one production. The call sheet does not contain a call time — it displays the call time, and it is regenerated the instant the field changes. The crew booking does not contain a call time either; it points at the same field. Change the field once and every downstream artefact is already correct, because none of them ever held their own copy to begin with.

The failure mode disappears not because anyone became more diligent, but because the opportunity to be inconsistent was removed.

A group chat is a log, not a record

This is the substitution I see most often, and it feels productive, which is why it is so durable. A WhatsApp group is genuinely useful: it is fast, everyone is already in it, and it produces a perfect chronological history of what was said.

But a log answers what happened. A record answers what is true now. Those are different questions, and only one of them matters at 6am on a shoot day. To get the current call time out of a chat, you scroll — and scrolling is an act of interpretation. Two people scrolling the same thread can reasonably land on different answers, particularly if somebody floated a change that was never confirmed. Every group chat I have ever been in contains at least one message that reads like a decision and was not one.

So: keep the chat for coordination and tone and the thousand small things that never become facts. But when something in it changes a value — a time, a rate, an address, a deliverable — that value gets changed in the record first, and the message afterwards says where it changed. The chat becomes a notification layer over a record, which is what it is good at.

The thirteen stages

A production is not a folder. It is an object that moves through stages, and it carries the same identity the whole way — the enquiry that came in on a Tuesday in March and the invoice you chase in July are the same thing, not two things that happen to share a name. Most of the pain in a small production company comes from treating them as separate, so that information has to be re-entered at every boundary.

Each stage adds facts; none of them should re-ask for facts that already exist. The client's billing address was captured at Enquiry and is still there at Invoice. The shoot date agreed at Booking is the same date the call sheet reads at stage eight and the same date the archive is filed under at thirteen. If your process asks for the address twice, the process has a hole in it, and someone will eventually fill that hole with a slightly different address.

The last stage is the one small companies skip, and it is the one that compounds. A retrospective does not need to be a meeting. It needs to be four numbers written down while you still remember: what you quoted, what it cost, how long the edit actually took against what you assumed, and the one thing that nearly went wrong. Do that thirty times and you have something no amount of instinct gives you — a company that quotes from evidence.

One value, one owner, one place

The working rule, and the test to apply to any process you are designing:

• One value. A fact exists once. The shoot date is not "the date in the calendar and the date on the call sheet" — it is one date, displayed twice.
• One owner. Every value has a person who is allowed to change it. Not a department, a person. Shared ownership is no ownership; it is the reason two people both assumed the other had rung the location.
• One place. Everything else is a view. A call sheet, a kit list, a crew booking confirmation and a client status update are all views of the same production, generated on demand, never authored independently.

Everything that follows in this Playbook is an application of those three lines. The twelve-point check works because each point resolves to a value with an owner. Kit clashes surface because a piece of equipment is one record with dates against it, not a word on a list. Call sheets stop lying because they are generated rather than written. And costing a shoot day only works at all if the day rate you agreed is the same number that lands in the margin calculation four months later.

Checklists get a bad reputation in creative businesses because they sound like the opposite of judgement. They are not. A checklist is what protects judgement — it takes the twelve things that are always true and gets them off your mind, so the attention you have left goes on the thing that is unusual about this particular job.

Two rules make the difference between a list that works and a list that becomes a box-ticking ritual.

It is the same twelve every time. Not a bespoke list per job. The moment the list is edited per production, you lose the thing that makes it valuable: the ability to notice, instantly, that number nine is missing. A varied list has to be read; a fixed list can be scanned.

Each point is owned by a person, not a department. "Production has it" is how two people each assume the other rang the location. A name against a line is the whole mechanism.

The twelve

The trap in point six

Because everyone books freelancers, everyone assumes employers' liability insurance is somebody else's problem. It frequently is not, and this is worth getting right rather than guessing.

The test the Health and Safety Executive applies is not your tax treatment and not what the contract calls the person. It is the substance of the working relationship — and the indicators that point towards someone being your employee for insurance purposes read uncomfortably like a normal crew booking: you control what they do and when they do it, you supply the equipment, they cannot send a substitute, they carry no risk of loss and no share of profit.

A camera operator you booked by name, who has to turn up personally, who works to your call sheet, on your camera package, is matching several of those indicators regardless of the fact that they invoice you. The safe position for a small production company that directs people on set is to hold employers' liability cover and not rely on the word "freelance" to remove the duty. Chapter six goes through the three separate status tests properly, because they give different answers and people conflate them constantly.

Percentage-ready is a lie unless it names the gap

A production that shows 92% ready and stops there has told you nothing you can act on. Twelve points, eleven done, is only useful if the twelfth is on screen: public liability certificate not checked against Thursday. The number is a summary; the value is in the remainder.

This is the single most useful thing to build into whatever you run the check in, whether that is software or a shared sheet. Not a progress bar — a named gap, with a name against it.

Most kit lists in small production companies are shopping lists. They say things like 2 x camera, 3 x lens, sticks, 2 x light, radio mics, boom, monitor, batteries, media. That list is genuinely useful on the morning — you can pack from it — and it is completely incapable of telling you that one of those two cameras is on somebody else's job.

The upgrade is not more detail. It is a change of type. A shopping list is text; an allocation is a set of relationships between specific items and specific dates. Only the second kind can produce a warning.

Camera A is a record with a serial number and a diary. “A camera” is a word, and words do not clash.

Item identity comes first

Every physical thing you own gets a record with an identity that survives being moved around: manufacturer, model, serial number, purchase date and price, current status, and where it lives when it is not out. The serial number matters more than it seems — it is what makes an insurance claim straightforward, what makes a police report meaningful if a van gets emptied, and what lets you tell two identical bodies apart when one of them has a fault.

Give them names people will actually use. Camera A and Camera B, not FX6 #2. Crews already speak this way, and a system that makes people translate their own vocabulary is a system they will bypass.

Saved kits, then the per-job list

Nearly every shoot you do is a variation on four or five setups. A standard interview package. A two-camera podcast. A run-and-gun event day. Build those once as saved kits — a named set of items — and start every production by pulling one in and then editing it.

This is worth doing for the boring reason that it stops you forgetting the boring things. Nobody forgets the camera. People forget the spare batteries, the right mains adapter, the gaffer tape, the second card reader, the XLR that is long enough for the room you have not seen. A saved kit is accumulated company memory of everything that has ever caught you out, and it is cheaper than learning it again.

The per-job list then differs from the saved kit in ways that are visible, which is itself useful information: standard interview kit, minus the second light, plus a 300mm tells you more than a fresh list of twenty items.

Why clashes stay hidden

Two things have to be true for a double-booking to be detectable, and small companies usually have neither.

Items have to be unique. If the record says "2 x camera" as a quantity, the system cannot tell you which one is contested, and it cannot tell you that the one you actually want is the one with the working eyecup. Quantities are for consumables. Anything with a serial number is a distinct record.

Bookings have to carry a date range, not a date. This is the one that catches everyone. A camera on a Thursday shoot is not busy on Thursday — it is busy from Wednesday afternoon when it gets prepped and checked, through Thursday, until Friday morning when it comes back and gets put on charge. Book it against the shoot day alone and you have declared it available on Wednesday evening, which is exactly when somebody else will take it for their Friday.

Once those two things are true, the clash check is trivial and can run automatically: for every item on this production, does an overlapping booking exist? The point is that it runs at the moment the production is being built — a fortnight out, when the answer is "then hire one in" — rather than in the van, when the answer is "we shoot it single camera and tell the client afterwards".

Hired-in kit

Hired kit needs to be in the same list, flagged as hired, because otherwise the clash check has a hole in it and the call sheet has a gap. Two things to keep straight:

• You are usually strictly liable. Rental terms in this country generally make the hirer responsible for loss or damage regardless of fault, for the whole period the kit is out. Read the terms once, properly, for the houses you use most.
• Insure the replacement value, not the hire fee. A £480 hire can carry a £30,000 package. Hired-in cover has to be sized to what you would have to pay to replace it, and the limit on your policy is a limit per incident, not per item.

Book the return, not just the collection. An overdue return on a Friday afternoon costs a weekend's hire, and it happens because the return was in someone's head rather than in the diary.

Out and back

A status field is only worth having if the values mean something operationally distinct. The ones that earn their place:

The discipline that makes this real is checking back in, item by item, against the list you took out. It is ten minutes and everyone hates it. It is also the only moment at which a missing item is attached to a specific job and a specific person, which is the difference between "we lost a radio mic somewhere this year" and "it did not come back from Wednesday".

Consumables — media, batteries, tape, gels, cable ties — sit outside all of this and should. Track them as quantities with a reorder threshold, not as records. The failure mode there is not a clash, it is running out, and the fix is a minimum stock level and someone whose job it is to look at it.

Ask a production company owner which of last year's jobs made money and you will usually get an answer about which invoices were biggest. Those are different questions, and the gap between them is where a company quietly stops growing: you take more of the work that feels successful and less of the work that actually pays, because nothing ever told you which was which.

This chapter is about building a day from its parts so that the difference is visible before you quote it, and provable afterwards.

The shape of a UK day

The standard here is 10+1 — ten working hours plus one unpaid hour for lunch, so an eleven-hour span. An 08:00 call is a 19:00 wrap. That is the unit almost everything else is priced against.

Two bits of vocabulary worth having right, because using the wrong one marks a document as imported:

• 10+1 is the British shorthand. "10/12" is American and will read oddly to a UK crew.
• A continuous working day is a day run without a formal break — around nine hours — and it is a different, agreed thing, not what happens when lunch gets skipped by accident.

For commercials and branded work, the APA Recommended Terms for Engaging Crew on Commercials is the nearest thing this market has to a reference document, and the current edition took effect on 1 September 2026. It is a trade body's recommended terms, so it binds only when your deal memo incorporates it — but it is what people argue from, and pointing a client at a published third-party standard is considerably easier than defending a number you invented.

Overtime is not a rounding error

The structure of overtime in the APA terms surprises people the first time, because it runs backwards to intuition: the multiplier falls as the day rate rises. Crew on lower basic rates get time-and-a-half; crew on the highest basic rates absorb overtime at flat time.

Run it on a job. A five-person crew averaging £550 a day, planned as a 10+1, that overruns by two hours: the hourly is £55, the multiplier 1.25, so £68.75 an hour, times two hours, times five people — £687.50 you did not quote for, on a day that felt like it went well. Do that four times a year and you have lost the profit on a whole job to hours nobody wrote down.

The fix is not to squeeze crew. It is to schedule honestly and to price overtime into the quote as a stated rate rather than discovering it afterwards. A client who knows overtime costs money makes better scheduling decisions than a client who does not.

The other numbers in the same family

• Turnaround. Eleven hours minimum between wrap and the next call. It is measured wrap-to-call and does not net off travel — an eleven-hour turnaround with a two-hour drive each way is a seven-hour sleep window, and that is a safety issue before it is a contractual one.
• Meal breaks. The first break should start no more than five and a half hours in. Delay it and there is a penalty; push it far enough and the day converts to a continuous working day, which is a different and more expensive animal.
• Travel is conventionally paid at single time whatever the day, with mileage outside the M25 and nothing for journeys inside it.
• Cancellation. The published scale is 7+ days nothing, 6–4 days 50%, 3–2 days 75%, the day before 100%. This is the most-omitted clause in corporate deal memos and the one that costs freelancers most.

Building the day

A quote that survives contact with reality has these lines in it, whether or not the client sees them broken out:

• Crew, by name and grade, at the agreed day rate, with the overtime rate stated.
• Your own time — prep, recce, scheduling, the call sheet, and the day itself if you are on it. This is the line small companies leave out, which is how you end up working for nothing on your own job.
• Kit, charged. Owned kit is not free; it depreciated, it needs insuring, and it will need replacing. Charging for it is also what keeps the equipment side honest about which items earn their keep.
• Hired kit, at cost plus whatever handling you charge, for the full possession period.
• Travel, parking, permits, catering, priced rather than absorbed.
• Post — and post is where quotes go wrong, because it is estimated from the finished film rather than from the number of deliverables and the number of revision rounds. Two rounds included, further rounds chargeable, stated in writing.
• Music and rights, at the tier the actual distribution requires.
• Contingency, and it is not padding — it is the honest price of a job with unknowns in it.

The VAT bit people get wrong

Three things, and they are worth twenty minutes of attention because they recur on every invoice you will ever raise.

Recharged expenses are not disbursements

If you contracted for the cost — the hotel, the train, the courier, the location fee, the catering — it is part of your supply, and you charge VAT on it at your own rate. That holds even where the underlying cost carried no VAT: a zero-rated train fare becomes standard-rated when it is recharged as part of a standard-rated production service.

A true disbursement is rare and has to satisfy a strict list of conditions — you acted as the client's agent, the client was responsible for paying the third party, you recovered exactly what you paid, it is itemised separately, and you did not reclaim the input tax. If you marked it up, it is not a disbursement. Most production "expenses" fail this at the first hurdle, and treating them as VAT-free is a straightforward assessment risk.

The reverse charge you actually meet

There is a persistent belief that production companies have a reverse charge problem. They mostly do not — the domestic reverse charge people are thinking of is the construction one, and it has no application to filming.

The one that does apply is on services bought from overseas suppliers: an overseas colourist, an overseas VFX house, stock libraries, and software billed from outside the UK. You account for the VAT yourself, output and input, and if you can recover in full the net effect is nil.

But there is a sting worth knowing if you are not yet registered: the value of those reverse-charge purchases counts towards your VAT registration threshold. A sub-threshold company buying significant overseas post or software can be pushed over the line by its own purchases, which is not intuitive and not forgiving.

Invoicing abroad

For business customers overseas the general rule puts the place of supply where the customer is, so a UK company invoicing an EU or US business is outside the scope of UK VAT — no UK VAT charged. You do need evidence the customer is in business and keep it on file: their VAT number where one exists, or company registration and a contract or PO where it does not. EC Sales Lists no longer apply to services.

Margin, and the numbers to keep

Revenue minus production cost is the only figure that tells you whether a job was worth doing. Keep it per production, not per client and not per month, because the average hides the thing you need to see.

The costs most often left out of that calculation, in rough order of how much damage they do:

• Unbilled overtime.
• Your own time, particularly prep and client management.
• Revision rounds beyond what was quoted.
• Offload, media handling and archive — real hours, invisible on every quote.
• Chasing payment. A ninety-day payer costs you money even when they pay in full.

Thirty jobs with those numbers attached will tell you things instinct will not: that the retainer client you find slightly tedious is the profitable one, that a particular kind of event day never makes money at the rate you charge, that your edit estimates are consistently forty per cent light. None of that is available from an invoice total.

The call sheet is the only artefact in a production that everybody reads and almost nobody maintains. It goes out on Monday for a Thursday shoot, and between Monday and Thursday four things change: a crew member swaps, the client moves the call, the location contact goes on leave, and the schedule gets reshaped around an interviewee who can only do the morning. If the call sheet was typed into a template, none of those changes reach it unless someone remembers to retype them — and remembering is not a system.

If your call sheet can be wrong while the production is right, you have built it the wrong way round.

Everything on a call sheet already exists somewhere else. The crew names are the bookings. The call times are on the bookings. The location, the parking, the access contact are on the location record. The schedule is the schedule. The kit summary is the allocation. The client contact is on the client. A call sheet contains no original information at all — which means it should be generated, and the only thing you should ever be editing is the underlying fact.

What has to be on it

Written for someone reading it on a phone, in the dark, at five in the morning, having slept badly:

• Production. Project, client, production company, date, and which shoot day of how many.
• Location. The address people should actually drive to — which is the loading entrance or the crew car park, not the reception on the website. A what3words or pin for anywhere rural. Parking, and whether it needs paying for. Who unlocks, at what time, on what mobile number.
• Nearest A&E. Checked for this location, on this date. Not carried over from the last call sheet, because hospital departments close and relocate and the one time it matters is the one time you cannot be looking it up.
• Contacts. Producer, director, client contact, location contact, with mobile numbers that have been dialled at least once.
• Crew. Name, role, individual call time, and their number. Individual, because the sound recordist arriving with the camera team at 07:00 for a 10:00 interview is an hour of your money spent on someone sitting in a car.
• Schedule. Arrival, setup, first shot, breaks, moves, wrap. With a lunch time on it, at a plausible hour.
• Kit summary, and specifically who is bringing what. Most missing-kit incidents are ownership failures, not memory failures.
• Travel and logistics. Hotels, trains, who is driving whom.
• Notes. Weather with a real forecast, dress code, site security and ID requirements, anything the client has asked for, and anything genuinely unusual about the day.

The five ways a call sheet lies

Worth naming, because each one has a different fix and only one of them is about carelessness.

One: a hold shown as a booking. The most expensive lie on the list. A name printed in the crew block reads as confirmed to everybody who sees it, including you. If the underlying record says held, the call sheet must say so or the person must not be on it. There is no polite middle state that survives a Thursday.

Two: a stale contact. The location contact changed, or left, and the number on the sheet reaches a desk nobody is at. Fixed by having one location record that the call sheet reads from, so updating it once updates it everywhere it appears.

Three: a superseded call time. Covered in chapter one, and the reason this book starts where it does.

Four: the wrong address. Reception versus loading bay, the retail unit versus the office above it, the second entrance on a different street. Fixed by recording the arrival point separately from the postal address, permanently, the first time you shoot there.

Five: an impossible schedule. The sheet says wrap at 18:00 and the schedule adds up to 19:30. Everyone can see it and nobody says it, because the sheet has the authority of a printed document. A generated call sheet can total its own schedule and flag the gap, which is exactly the sort of small, unglamorous check that software should be doing.

Versions, and the change rule

The rule is short and it needs agreeing before the first sheet goes out, not during the argument:

Any material change produces a new version. The version is numbered. The distribution says what changed.

Material means: a call time, a location, a crew member, the schedule shape, or anything safety-related. Fixing a typo in the weather note does not need a version two.

The part people skip is the last clause. A revised call sheet that arrives with "updated call sheet attached" makes every recipient re-read four pages to find the difference, and most of them will not. "Version 3 — Sam's call moved to 08:30, everything else unchanged" takes ten seconds to write and is read by everyone. The message carries the change; the document carries the state.

Number the versions rather than dating them. Two versions on the same day is normal, and "the latest one" is not a thing anybody can verify from their inbox at 6am.

Getting it read

Send it as a link that always resolves to the current version, and attach a PDF for the people who will be somewhere with no signal — which on a location shoot is a real consideration, not a hypothetical one. The link is the truth; the PDF is a snapshot, and it should say on its face which version it is and when it was generated, so that anyone holding a printout knows whether they are holding history.

Send it to the client and the location contact too. Half of the coordination problems on a shoot day come from the client's team not knowing when the crew arrives, and a call sheet is the cheapest possible way to look organised to the person paying.

A small production company is a set of relationships with people it does not employ. The DoP who knows your client's brand, the sound recordist who has done every one of your podcast days, the editor who does not need the brief explained twice — those relationships are the actual asset, more than the kit and considerably more than the website.

They are also where the most compliance risk sits, and the two facts are related: the arrangements that feel most comfortable and informal are frequently the ones that are hardest to defend if anyone asks.

Availability, hold, confirm

Three states, in order, and the discipline is in never letting one masquerade as another.

Availability request. The date, the broad location, the role, the approximate hours, and when you will know. Not the full brief — you are asking a scheduling question, and a freelancer reading a paragraph of client background to work out whether they are free on the 14th is being made to do your work.

Hold. They are available and pencilled. A hold is a mutual understanding with an expiry date on it, and the expiry is the entire point. "I'll hold you for the 14th, and I'll confirm or release by end of Friday" is a hold. "Keep the 14th free for me" is a favour you are asking, and it costs the other person real money if they turn work down for it.

Confirm. In writing, with the date, the call, the location, the rate, the overtime rate, the cancellation terms and what happens about kit. This is the booking. Everything before it is a conversation.

Three status tests, and they disagree

This is the part that is genuinely fiddly, and the reason it is fiddly is that "is this person self-employed?" is not one question. It is three questions with three different tests, asked by three different bodies, and it is entirely normal for the answers to differ on the same person on the same day.

A camera operator can be self-employed for tax, a worker for employment law, and your employee for health and safety purposes — all at once, correctly. Anyone who tells you the answer is simple is answering a different question from the one you asked.

The tax question, properly

HMRC maintains a list of behind-camera roles that can normally be treated as self-employed. It used to live in a paper document called the Film and Television Production Industry Guidance Notes; since 2019 it has lived in HMRC's Employment Status Manual, and the list itself is Appendix 1 at ESM4118. Camera operator, sound recordist, editor, DoP, producer and most of the technical grades are on it.

Being on the list is not the end of the question — it is the start. A role qualifies where either of two conditions is met:

• Column A is a test specific to the grade. For a camera operator it is providing substantial equipment. For a sound recordist, substantial equipment or the Hall v Lorimer conditions. For an editor, control over execution and rare skill and judgement.
• Column B applies where the engagement is on a specific production, for a finite period, as a discrete engagement. HMRC defines all three: a specific production includes a commercial or a music video; finite means fixed to a deliverable or a project rather than a number of months; discrete means a genuine separate engagement, not one sitting under an overarching agreement.

The trap is worth spelling out. A camera operator hired without their own kit — shooting on your package — fails Column A, and now everything rests on Column B. Which is fine if you booked them for a named production for a fixed deliverable. It is not fine if they have been coming in three days a week for eight months on a rolling arrangement with no named production, which is a description of employment however everyone involved describes it.

What to keep

There is no prescribed statutory record for a status decision, which means what protects you is evidence of a considered position:

• A signed engagement per production, naming the production and the deliverable and the finite term. This is the evidence for Column B, and a rolling day-rate arrangement with no named production is what destroys it.
• Evidence of the Column A fact you relied on — the kit list or hire invoices for a camera operator or sound recordist supplying their own package.
• The CEST output, saved as a PDF with the answers you gave. HMRC stands by the result as long as the information remains accurate.
• Their invoice and UTR.

Keeping a roster of contractors you call regularly is fine and does not create an overarching agreement, provided each assignment is separately negotiated. Planning ahead is not the problem; the problem is an arrangement that has quietly become continuous.

The simplifying move

Given three tests that disagree, the practical answer for a small company is to stop trying to find the arrangement that minimises every obligation, and instead treat the statutory floors as applying to everyone on the call sheet regardless of engagement status. Eleven hours' turnaround, a proper break, honest hours. It is cheaper than being wrong, it is what the industry conventions already assume, and it is how you would want to be treated on someone else's job.

Paying people

Payment terms are part of the booking, not a separate negotiation that happens after the work. State them when you confirm.

Pay on time even when the client has not paid you. A freelancer's cash position is not a buffer you are entitled to use, and the reputational cost of being a slow payer in a market this small is out of all proportion to the cash-flow benefit. The people who talk to each other about which companies pay late are exactly the people you want available in March.

Where a freelancer is VAT-registered, they recover their own input VAT and invoice you a fee; you recover the VAT on their invoice. Do not also claim VAT on their receipts — that is the same tax claimed twice, and it is the sort of thing that turns a routine enquiry into a longer one.

Crew records and data protection

Crew personal data is in scope of UK GDPR on the same footing as staff data — the ICO's employment guidance covers contractors and gig workers explicitly, whatever the contract says. You hold contact details, addresses, bank details, next of kin, sometimes right-to-work documents and insurance certificates. That is a real processing operation and it needs the basics done.

• Do not rely on consent. The ICO's position is that consent is hard to rely on in an employment context because of the imbalance of power. Contact and bank details are necessary to perform the engagement, so contract is the natural basis; right-to-work checks are a legal obligation.
• Set retention periods and honour them. There is no statutory period for most of it, so you must choose and justify. One hard anchor: right-to-work evidence is kept for the engagement plus two years.
• Register with the ICO and pay the fee. A company of this size is £52 or £78 a year depending on turnover and headcount, less £5 for direct debit. The exemption is narrower than people assume, and holding contributor footage takes you outside it.
• Keep a record of processing. The "under 250 employees" exemption does not help you, because it does not cover processing that is routine — and crew payroll and contributor footage both are.
• Have a complaints route. Since June 2026 organisations must have a way for individuals to complain to them directly about data handling.
• You do not need a data protection officer at this size. Name a responsible person instead; a voluntary DPO takes on the full statutory duties, which is not what a six-person company wants.

The database that becomes an advantage

A freelancer record that is genuinely useful holds: roles, primary and secondary; location and travel radius; day rate, half-day rate and overtime terms; kit owned; insurance and its expiry date; documents; and the history of every job they have done with you, with what it cost.

That last part is what turns a contact list into something valuable. It lets you answer questions you currently answer from memory and get wrong — who have we booked most this year, who did the last three jobs for this client, what did we actually pay for a sound recordist in June, whose insurance expires before the shoot. Those are the queries that make crewing fast, and speed in crewing is most of what a producer's day is.

Set a reminder against insurance expiry dates. It is the least glamorous automation in this entire document and it will save you a shoot day.