Live
Production Desk
Live production, from first brief to final cost.
Production Desk draws on more than three decades of building and managing small-business back-office systems — from rental software and bespoke Excel/VBA tools to today's SaaS platforms. Specialist systems can handle accounting, CRM or individual workflows well, but they rarely connect neatly to the day-to-day operation or provide the concise attention summaries managers and stakeholders need. APIs, MCP and LLMs now make a more connected, tailored operational layer possible without requiring a small business to commission an enormous software platform.
The opportunity
Designed for Small production businesses, independent producers and operations teams
Small production businesses manage a dense web of linked decisions with limited back-office capacity, while crucial information is fragmented across spreadsheets, email, documents and individual memory.
Working now
- ✓Project production workspace
- ✓Crew calls, schedules and rate snapshots
- ✓RFQ line items and vendor workflows
- ✓Compliance, permits, insurance and status boards
Next on the roadmap
- 01Package a seeded public product tour
- 02Connect external services through controlled API and MCP integrations
- 03Send structured RFQs to vendors and use LLM-assisted extraction to parse returned quotes into reviewable, comparable line items
- 04Carry crew outreach from availability checks through confirmations, deal memos and follow-up
- 05Collect and track the appropriate crew onboarding and tax records — such as W-4 and I-9 documents for employees or W-9 details for contractors — and flag what is missing or needs renewal
- 06Track rental-vendor insurance requirements and the negotiation trail around certificates, transit coverage, loss and damage responsibilities
- 07Complete budget-source and actual-cost workflows around approved vendor and crew commitments
- 08Test the connected workflow with small production teams
Project in brief
“The experience behind Production Desk reaches back to early-1990s rental-management systems and bespoke Excel/VBA tools for budgets, forecasts and sales operations, through the arrival of CRM and accounting SaaS, and into years of running live, streaming and post-production work while managing the small-business back office behind it.
The problem was never a lack of spreadsheets. It was that crew, schedules, suppliers, costs and compliance all affect one another, while the information lives in separate places.
Production Desk is the connective operational layer around those specialist systems: a single production workspace designed to keep the real dependencies visible and surface concise attention summaries for managers and stakeholders.
What has changed is the scale of the automation opportunity. APIs can connect specialist services; MCP can give AI systems controlled access to the right operational context and actions; and LLMs can help turn emails, quotes and documents into structured work for people to review rather than retype.
The longer-term automation path follows the work already happening around it: issue structured RFQs and turn returned vendor quotes into comparable line items; move crew from availability checks through confirmations, deal memos and follow-up; and collect the appropriate onboarding and tax records for staff review. That includes tracking W-4 and I-9 documents where crew are engaged as employees, or W-9 details where they invoice as contractors, including through an S corporation or another incorporated entity. The system would surface missing or outdated records and the resulting payroll responsibilities without making the legal classification itself.
For rental vendors, the same principle applies to the back-and-forth that rarely fits neatly inside a quote: requested insurance certificates, who provides coverage while equipment is in transit, and where responsibility for loss or damage changes hands. Production Desk would keep those decisions attached to the supplier, rental and project rather than buried in email.”
Tailored implementation
A foundation for your production workflow.
Production Desk provides a substantial starting point for a tailored operational system shaped around your company’s crew, suppliers, costs, compliance and reporting needs.
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