Entertainment Partners’ UK arm needed to grow market share ahead of a TPG private equity sale. The prior version of their timesheet product had failed so severely it was discontinued — leaving customers, retention, and satisfaction at zero. Payroll delays cost film productions millions, so the replacement had to work from day one.

The problem

Customers were choosing competitors even though those products still required significant manual reconciliation — EP’s timesheets were slow and unreliable enough to make that trade-off worthwhile. The stakes were high: payroll delays can cost productions millions, and if one crew member leaves over a pay dispute the whole shoot can grind to a halt. With only a few days to gather hours, calculate pay and process payments, the bottlenecks were clear — chasing crew to submit, and waiting for approvals.

Four groups had to succeed for payroll to close on time.

What each role needed

Approach

I ran 30+ hours of user research, documenting ~300 user stories and mapping 19 jobs-to-be-done across a 12-month discovery period. Twice-weekly calls with sales and account management kept the research grounded in real commercial impact.

The project ran across 4 milestone phases over 12 months, producing approximately 2,000 screen and modal variants and 100 hours of user testing. Two problems had to be solved together: faster submissions only helped if approvals could keep pace.

What I designed

01

Pre-populated schedules

Contracted hours and the production timetable pulled into each weekly timesheet automatically. Crew reviewed and corrected rather than entering from scratch — removing the single largest source of completion time immediately.

For: Crew

Centralised daily schedule pulled into each timesheet

02

Real-time gross pay

Pay calculated dynamically as the timesheet was completed. Crew saw exactly what they'd be paid before submitting — eliminating the queries that delayed approvals downstream and the disputes that landed with payroll accountants.

For: Crew · Production Accountants

Gross pay calculated as crew fill in their hours

03

Consolidated claims

Mileage, expenses, and petty cash folded into the same submission flow rather than three separate processes. One form, one approval chain, one payroll entry — and one fewer reason for a submission to go missing.

For: Crew · Production Accountants

All payments in one place — mileage, expenses, petty cash

04

Highlighted edits

Values that differed from the previous week or contracted hours were surfaced automatically, visually distinct from unchanged entries. Approvers scanned for anomalies in seconds rather than reading line by line.

For: Production Management

Edited values highlighted automatically for approvers

05

Change history

Every edit timestamped and attributed to the person who made it, with a full log visible during the approval flow. Disputed entries resolved without guesswork; queries reaching payroll dropped significantly.

For: Production Management · Production Accountants

Full audit trail of every change, attributed and timestamped

06

Filterable approval dashboard

The approval queue filterable by department, contract type, and status. Large productions with hundreds of crew could be managed in batches — isolating the problem entries from the straightforward ones.

For: Production Management

Approval queue filterable by department, contract type, and status

07

Approval chain visibility

Full multi-stage workflow status in a single view, colour-coded by stage. Any bottleneck — a blocked approval, a missing countersignature — visible at a glance rather than requiring individual follow-up.

For: Production Management · Production Accountants

Multi-stage approval status in a single view

08

Financial summaries

Running totals at accounting level visible during the approval flow, cross-referenceable against production budgets without switching tools. Unusual spend patterns caught at approval rather than discovered after payroll closed.

For: Production Accountants

Running totals cross-referenceable against production budgets

09

Overtime anomaly detection

Department-wide overtime view surfacing outliers automatically — protecting productions from unexpectedly high payroll costs and giving accountants an audit trail before anything was approved.

For: Production Management · Production Accountants

Department-wide overtime view with automatic outlier detection

Outcomes

What changed for each role