Costs and reporting

Project costs record a date, category, amount, status and linked publishing project. The project holds the budget used for comparison. Finance Lead can distinguish draft entries, approved costs and paid costs, while Publishing Director sees the recorded cost position alongside production progress. Reports can group tasks by project and assignee, list rights terms, and follow editorial or edition activity from the same operating records.

• Cost category. Agree which categories the team will use so totals remain comparable across projects.
• Approval practice. Agree who changes a cost from draft to approved and who records that it has been paid.
• Reporting cutoff. Agree the date and status filters used when comparing recorded costs with the project budget.

Start with one real title and name the person who is responsible for the record. Decide who can revise dates or statuses, and when a change needs another person’s review. Check each actual project, manuscript, content or person reference before using that record in a handoff. The agreed practice should be visible in the record, not held only in an email thread.

For each handoff, identify the person expected to act next. Check that their user and People record are connected before relying on an approval decision. Keep the source attachment or agreement with the relevant record when the decision depends on it. This makes the working lists useful during a busy production week.

Consider a title with a planned budget and several editing and print preparation costs. Finance Lead enters each cost under the right project and category. A draft cost remains separate from an approved or paid one in the unsettled cost list. Publishing Director reviews the approved and paid amounts against the budget while Production Lead checks whether related tasks remain open. A cost report can reveal which category accounts for the current total, but the decision to change a project plan still belongs to the responsible people. Record any correction on the source cost entry before circulating the updated report.

Before expanding to other titles, ask the people named above to walk through this case in the app. They should be able to point to the current record, explain the next decision and find the owner without reconstructing the history from messages.

• Unsettled Project Costs — Draft and approved cost entries needing a decision or payment follow-up.
• Project Pipeline — Project budget, owner and status beside the work that drives the cost.

See the related process and the data model for the records behind this handoff.