52 Things to Manage When Running Production for Media and Events

Delivering a great production means focusing on the creative work that makes the event shine, not the 52 payroll, compliance, and workforce tasks that quietly drain your margins. The only way to stay profitable and stress-free is to get those tasks off your plate and into the hands of a partner who lives and breathes them.

If you’re running media and event productions, you’re juggling far more than lights, cameras, and talent. Behind every show are dozens of steps:

• Worker classification
• Onboarding
• Timesheets
• Approvals
• Compliance checks
• Audit

These are important, but they take time and don’t improve the client experience.

This can leave most teams stuck in one of two realities:

1. Status quo: Keep patching spreadsheets and tolerating the pain.
2. Payroll bolt-on: Add a generic system that doesn’t fit the pace of production.

But there’s a third option: find a specialized partner – someone who understands media & events – freeing your team to focus on the show. This is the option that gives you back time and protects your margins.

Because at the end of the day, YOU are the event expert. We’re payroll and compliance experts. Your event quality depends on creative, production, and client delivery, not on your team wrestling with timesheets and audits. The work volume is the same. The difference is focus. If your crew is buried in admin, the event will suffer.

Check out the difference:

When you group them by phase, it looks like this:

• Pre-Production: classification, onboarding packets, timekeeping setup.
• In-Production: timesheets, approvals, variance alerts, compliance checks, payroll runs.
• Post-Production: adjustments, job-cost reporting, and audits.

None of these steps delights your client, but any one of them can derail your margins. And the biggest culprit of derailed margins is cost blindness.

• Paying too many crew members for the workload.
• Missing overtime or workers’ comp rate changes.
• Having no visibility until after the event closes.

With a trusted partner and real-time reporting, you see problems early. So if you only need 10 crew members, you don’t end up paying 15.

Production seasons move fast. Festivals, live events, and campaigns hit in clusters, and opportunities can disappear in days. Without fast onboarding and compliance handling, teams miss work or worse, scramble and risk errors. The right support means you capture the work without the chaos.

Here is what a good process looks like:

• Pre-Production: classify workers correctly, confirm OT/WC rates, align budgets.
• In-Production: capture timecards daily, approve quickly, run clean payroll.
• Post-Production: finalize payroll, produce audit-ready reports, roll lessons into the next event.

This rhythm keeps the show running smoothly while protecting profitability. See how PayReel simplifies each phase.

So, there are 52 things you need to manage for every production. But none of them should be manual payroll, compliance, or workforce admin. The more your team stays focused on the show, the stronger your events – and your margins – will be.

Get started with PayReel today.