The crew deal memo and start paperwork

What a deal memo actually is

A crew deal memo is a short-form employment agreement: the production company, the project, the person, the position, the start and end dates, the rate and how it's paid, and any special terms — box rental, kit fee, car allowance, loan-out billing. It's deliberately small compared to a full contract, because it needs to be issued and signed at the speed productions actually hire.

Signed by both the crew member and an authorized representative of the production, it becomes the reference document everything else keys from. Rate changes, date extensions, position changes — those are amendments to the memo, not verbal understandings, because a payroll dispute is settled by what was signed, not what was discussed.

The start pack

Alongside the deal memo, a start collects the employment and compliance documents: identity and work-authorization verification, the tax forms that set withholding, union start paperwork where the person is covered by an agreement, and any banking details for payment. Each document has a different owner — payroll, accounting, the union, the bank — but they all arrive together or the person doesn't get paid.

The production's exposure is concrete: an unverified worker is a legal problem, missing tax forms delay the first check and frustrate good people, and missing union starts generate claims that arrive as invoices long after the person has wrapped.

• •Deal memo: position, dates, rate, special terms — signed by both sides.
• •Start pack: work authorization, tax forms, union starts, payment details.
• •Payroll pays from the paperwork; missing paperwork stalls payment, not work.

Loan-outs and special terms

Some crew invoice through a personal services company — a loan-out. The deal memo then records the company, its tax identity and the billing terms rather than treating the individual as a plain employee, and the payments route as vendor remittances rather than payroll, with different tax consequences for both sides. Recording it correctly at hire is a one-minute task; discovering the loan-out at first invoice is a week of re-papering.

Special terms are the same story at smaller stakes: box rentals, kit fees and car allowances are money with rules attached — taxable or not, capped or not, in the deal memo or not — and they recur weekly. Terms captured loosely at hire become a recurring reconciliation item for the entire show.

Paperwork as a system, not a stack

Start paperwork fails in production for one reason: it's treated as documents rather than a system. A folder of PDFs tells you nothing when you need to know who starts Monday without a signed I-9, or which of last month's hires never returned their union start. The information that matters is per-person status — hired, papered, cleared to pay — and that's a tracking problem, not a filing problem.

Productions that track starts as a checklist wrap with clean files; productions that collect paper wrap with an archaeology project, and the gaps are discovered by the auditors rather than by the production office.

How Clarice handles this

Clarice treats the deal memo as the hire's source record: position, dates, rate and special terms feed the crew record, and signed copies attach to the person with their tax documents and any union classification — loan-outs included, with the loan-out company carried as the billing entity.

Start paperwork is a per-person tracker: which documents are on file, which are outstanding, and who is cleared for payroll, with e-signature available for the agreements themselves. The crew portal lets each person complete and upload their own pack, so the production office chases a dashboard instead of a stack of email.