Travel days, company moves and per diems

Travel is a rate question first

Crew labor rates carry day-type assumptions: a shoot day at full rate, a travel day at a negotiated fraction — often a reduced rate or a flat travel allowance — and a prep or wrap day at its own terms. Union agreements and deal memos specify these, which means the travel plan is a cost plan: how many travel days the schedule implies, at which rates, for which crew, is a direct input to the labor budget.

This is why travel logistics sits close to the schedule. A company move that adds a travel day per person isn't a scheduling footnote — it's a measurable labor line, plus lodging, ground transport and per diems, multiplied across the whole unit. Productions that plan the moves early cost them accurately; productions that absorb moves late cost them at actuals.

• •Travel days carry their own rate treatment — fraction of day rate or flat allowance.
• •Company moves multiply: labor, lodging, ground transport and per diems per person.
• •Rate treatment is contractual: check the deal memo or the union agreement, not habit.

Lodging, ground and the manifest

Travel execution is a manifest problem: who flies which route, who drives, which vehicle moves with the unit, who rooms where, and which receipts belong to which traveler and which budget line. Flights get booked, changed and rebooked; rental vehicles get assigned drivers — each of whom is a labor line if the driving is paid; lodging blocks get assigned and revised as the crew list shifts.

The records that survive are the ones with structure: per-person travel entries with dates, legs, vendors, confirmation references and costs — airfare, ground, lodging — each tied to the budget category it draws from. An unstructured trail of confirmations in inboxes becomes unreconcilable at wrap, and travel is the category where receipts are hardest to recover after the fact.

Per diem: allowance, not reimbursement

Per diem is an allowance for meals and incidentals, paid per day rather than per receipt — commonly at published rates set by the jurisdiction or the production's own policy. Its accounting treatment differs from reimbursement: within policy rates it's generally not treated as taxable wages, which is why the days covered, the rate and the person are the facts that matter, not the itemized lunch.

The operational discipline is issuance and reconciliation: per diems issued per person per day against the actual days of the trip, adjustments when a day is fed by catering — a fed day is not a per diem day under most policies — and the totals rolled into the travel category or payroll reporting depending on how the production administers them. Overissued per diems are found at wrap, by which time they're an awkward conversation rather than a calculation.

Reconciling travel at the end

Travel's reconciliation burden is structural: costs are incurred by many people across many vendors with many receipts, and the budget line 'Travel & Transportation' aggregates them all. Without per-entry records — traveler, route, vendor, cost, receipt — the category closes as a single mystery number nobody can defend, and the difference between booked estimates and final invoices is simply lost.

Productions that keep travel as structured entries close the category the way they close any other: booked versus actual per leg, receipts attached per expense, and the budget line reconciled against the manifest rather than against memory.

How Clarice handles this

Clarice's travel log tracks every leg as a structured entry: traveler, mode, origin and destination, vendor, confirmation reference, costs — airfare, ground, lodging — and the budget line it draws from, with receipts attached per entry and status tracking from booked estimate to reconciled.

Per diems sit alongside as their own tracked issuance — person, days, rate — feeding the same budget category, and the project's travel view totals against the budget lines, so the travel category closes like every other line instead of as a wrap-week surprise. Travel PDF exports produce the manifest the accountant and the client both ask for.