A financing plan is a timing document
Every source in a finance plan lands on its own clock, and the shoot does not wait for any of them. The Fractional CFO job is to lay the sources against the spending curve week by week, find the trough, and finance it on purpose instead of on the producer's personal line of credit.
| Source | When the cash lands | What it can carry |
|---|---|---|
| Producer equity and development funding | First in | Development and early prep |
| Broadcaster licence fee | Instalments on contract milestones | Prep and part of the shoot |
| Interim credit facility | Drawn during prep and shoot | The spending the credits will eventually repay |
| Distribution advance | On delivery and acceptance | Post and delivery costs |
| Tax credit refunds | After the T2 is filed and assessed | Loan repayment — usually the last dollars in |
The trough is almost always deepest mid-shoot, when payroll is at maximum and the next licence instalment is still a milestone away. Knowing that in prep changes how you negotiate the milestone schedule itself.
Interim financing prices your paperwork
Lenders advance a discounted portion of the estimated credits, and both the discount and the appetite are set by the quality of the file: certificates progressing on schedule, a labour ledger with residency support behind every name, paymaster registers that tie to the books, and cost reports arriving on a cadence the lender can trust. A weak file does not just borrow less; it borrows slower, and slow money mid-shoot is the expensive kind. Walla Assaf spent years on the banking side before founding Tauro, and that shows up here as a lender package written in credit-committee language rather than producer optimism, supported where needed by Business Financing Advisory. The repayment story is the assessment date, so the CFO calendar and the tax filing calendar are the same calendar.
The cost report is the steering wheel
A weekly cost report holds three numbers per line: cost to date, commitments, and estimate to complete, adding up to the estimated final cost. Steering means watching the estimated final cost and the contingency burn, not the spend to date, because a show can be on budget for spending and already over on commitments. The completion guarantor reads the same report, and the practical rule is that they should never learn something from it before you do. When an overage is coming, surfacing it early converts a crisis into a conversation about which sources cover it, whether contingency, deferrals or additional equity, while there are still options on the table. The same report also feeds the cash plan directly: a category trending over on commitments moves the trough forward in the weekly cash view, and the drawdown schedule on the interim facility gets adjusted before the shortfall arrives rather than after payroll bounces.
Between productions, the company still eats
The corporate entity above the shows has its own economics: overhead payroll, rent, development spending, and producer fees flowing in unevenly as productions hit their fee triggers. Licence agreements usually hold back a final instalment until every delivery item is accepted, so even a delivered show keeps a receivable worth tracking by name. The CFO discipline is a rolling corporate cash view that treats each show's fees as lumpy and the overhead as permanent, an honest number for what the company burns per month with no camera rolling, and a development budget set deliberately each year rather than absorbed by default. This is also where slate capacity gets decided: how many productions the balance sheet and the team can carry at once before the company is financing shows with money it does not have. The monthly corporate close that feeds all of this comes from our production accounting work, which keeps the ledgers the CFO layer steers by.
What the engagement looks like
A monthly cadence for the corporate picture, a weekly one while a show is in production: cash plan refreshed against the cost report, lender and guarantor reporting out the door on time, and the next production's finance plan stress-tested before commitments are signed. Scope is quoted in writing after a free discovery call, and we work with production companies across Mississauga and the GTA at whatever intensity the slate currently demands.
