Toronto-headquartered Bulloch Entertainment Services, a member of The Comweb Group, has introduced proXee (Production Office Express), a new payroll software product that increases efficiency in production management on the set of film and tv productions.

Bulloch, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, provides financial services to the entertainment industry, focusing on payroll.

"Payroll in this industry is very specific," says Mark Prior, president of Bulloch. "It’s very complex and it’s all union-based. The payroll agreements are nightmares because they all have variances all over the place. It takes an accountant 10 minutes to calculate a time sheet, and when you’re doing that at 10 p.m. after a very long day, that gets pretty tedious."

Bulloch offered a solution back in 1993 in the form of Bulloch On Location software, the ancestor of proXee. With bol, the user has to simply input an employee’s start and end times into the computer and the time sheet is calculated according to union specifications in seconds.

The company saw the next step being enabling users to input data into bol faster.

"A lot of the information is being gathered on set right now and given to the production manager, the production co-ordinator and the accounting department," Prior explains. "All that information gets transcribed, rehashed and processed over and over again, yet it’s all captured in one place."

Bulloch considered getting the information into bol either through scanning time sheets or some form of swipe cards, but deemed neither system practical. The company then looked to the hand-held solution of a Palm Pilot. The Palm would essentially replace the 2nd ad’s clipboard as a place to record production report data on the set. The electronically collected data could then be sent out to a website.

"It hits the website immediately, which means it’s immediately available for distribution to all the other players involved, including the producer and the studios," Prior says. "All of a sudden we had this information being collected in one place that could be disseminated to everybody who needed to get their hands on it."

Prior says proXee not only saves time, but also eliminates the redundancy of data collection and reduces the possibility of error, because when data is passed along manually the likelihood of mistakes increases.

When the work hours and other production info are loaded into the relevant project’s website, a draft of the production report is created that can be additionally manipulated on the Internet. It can then be published and distributed to the necessary parties.

"So various people see various things," Prior says. "The producer sees the production report, but only the accounting department sees the salaries that are paid to individuals."

Prior says there are three potential competitors to bol in the industry: "Two of those are very large American companies. We know they have products like bol on the boards, but to date have not come without them. We expect they will, because it’s a great idea and everybody loves the product."

Bulloch says last year its solutions were applied to more than 200 features, tv series and mows, including Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict, The 6th Day and X-Men. *

-www.proxee.com

-www.bulloch.ca