Wrapbook: The unified platform for entertainment payroll, accounting, cost-tracking, and reporting

In the entertainment industry, every production is like a new startup: teams must create and align on new budgets and profit and loss (P&L) outlines; hire, onboard, pay new crew members, and secure insurance; and establish new accounting and reporting systems. For all the movies, TV shows, documentaries, and music videos we’ve consumed in our lives, rarely do we consider the logistics of each production beyond the actors visible on the screen. Remarkably, many of these logistics processes still take place offline, leveraging paper forms and disparate systems, creating significant manual overhead and effort for production teams. 

Out of all of the areas of complexity in entertainment, one of the most acute is payroll. For one individual production, anywhere from hundreds to thousands of crewmembers—from camera crew to hair and makeup, from union to non-union—may need to be hired and onboarded. As a consequence, much of the entertainment industry has historically relied on human paymasters to run payroll and then manually audit compliance of a given production. That is, until Wrapbook. 

Wrapbook: The rising star of entertainment payroll and accounting 

Wrapbook is a modern vertical SaaS solution for the entertainment industry that enables production companies to onboard and process crew payroll faster, streamline and automate production accounting, and manage other workflows like cost tracking and reporting in a unified, digital platform. In turn, Wrapbook saves production teams not only time and money, but also improves overall crew and employee satisfaction. Since its founding in 2018, Wrapbook has grown to now serve over 1,000 production clients, including becoming an approved payroll vendor for four major production studios. 

Our team at Bessemer first met Wrapbook in 2019 when it served only the smallest customers and production forms. But over the past 5 years that we have gotten to know the business, we have seen it evolve to cater to larger customers and more sophisticated production forms like feature-length film and TV–all while retaining tremendous customer love and driving clear ROI. From award-winning production companies, to well-regarded commercial studios, to freelance production projects, customers across the entertainment landscape rave about the seamless crew experience and the transformational impact Wrapbook has to their onboarding and payroll processes. 

Wrapbook’s core product allows crewmembers to make online profiles that store payment details and onboarding forms, and they are usable across productions, saving crew and production company time while providing an excellent product experience for over 175K workers today. But it does not stop there. Over the years, Wrapbook has further extended its platform to support production accounting, cost tracking, reporting, and insurance, creating an end-to-end, unified solution that provides real-time visibility across all areas of spend for entertainment productions, from commercials to studio-grade feature films. In particular, production accounting, launched just in the past year, has grown to become a robust, comprehensive solution for production accountants to manage all workflows related to approving timecards, entering and managing purchase orders, tracking actuals vs. budget, downloading cost reports, and more. What we have seen from Wrapbook in over five years of getting to know the business is a relentless dedication to building out more and more product for the entertainment payroll audience that just works better. 

But as we know, “the biz” is about relationships—it is about people—and our investment in Wrapbook is people-first. When we met co-founders Ali Javid and Cameron Woodward, we were impressed with their grit, ability to build and shape a dynamic organization, and dogged customer-centricity. Across all of our interactions both within the organization and with end customers, it was clear how passionate they are to improve the entertainment finance suite and the professional experience of those who work in it. In addition to having significant entertainment experience themselves–Cameron ran a production insurance company before founding Wrapbook–they have recruited a superstar team to help them on this journey. Under their leadership, Wrapbook has grown to become a team of 250+ people, including industry experts from SAG-AFTRA, DGA, IATSE, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Entertainment Partners, Cast & Crew, and more, merging the best of Silicon Valley tech with longstanding entertainment expertise.  

Our team at Bessemer has had a long history of supporting leading vertical software companies that have transformed and digitized entire industries, such as Toast for restaurants, Shopify for e-commerce, and Procore for construction. We believe that Wrapbook has the same opportunity to radically transform the entertainment industry with a tailored cloud solution, and we look forward to partnering with Ali, Cameron, and the entire company on their journey to modernize production payroll, accounting, and more for all forms of entertainment.