Film and TV Financial Management and Production Accounting
Anchor FTV is a company set up to focus specifically on providing value added production accounting and financial support to the small and medium sized film and TV market.
★★★★★
Our core business is supporting film and TV shows up to £15m budget. This is an area that has traditionally been poorly served:
- Limited number of production accountants available.
- The most common industry accounting packages are expensive and ill-suited to small productions as well as being manually intensive to utilise.
- Given budget constraints, production accounting is often restricted to basic accounting functions – bookkeeping, VAT, Cost report production, with limited, if any genuine financial management support to producers.
These are not our views, but those of numerous producers, and other industry professionals, we talked to before setting Anchor up.
Our aim is to show that production accounting can do a lot more than the basics, and provide a genuine value added service to producers, without any increase on typical industry accounting costs. You will find that we do things a little differently!
The two founders both have extensive film and TV experience, but crucially have extensive senior level experience outside the film industry, so are able to call upon ideas and working practices from other industries, notable finance, where it makes sense to do so.
Andrew Nicholson
Director
Andrew qualified as Chartered Accountant in 1992 and previously worked in private practice, ending up as a Partner in a top 20 firm of Chartered Accountants. He fell into the film industry when first approached to help raise finance for a small independent feature film.
For the last 15 years he has worked with a number of film production companies, film studio operating companies, film producers and Directors, preparing the annual accounts and taxation computations as required for operating companies and film production companies, including all matters relating to film tax credits in the UK and Europe. As well as working with a number of accountancy and taxation firms he has also directly submitted claims to HMRC. Additionally, he has helped to raise finance for film production and film studio operations.
He has a good working knowledge of all aspects of film finance and taxation and currently is working on a number of projects within the film and tv industry ranging from production and financial accounting for independent films to production space including film studios.
Chris Reed
Director
Chris is a chartered accountant who has spent 25 years in senior finance roles in the City, including global roles as UBS and Credit Suisse and as Group Finance Director of investment bank Collins Stewart. He first ventured into film 10 years ago by accident, to help out a producer friend whose production had hit financial problems. Since then he has acted as producer on over 20 films, focussing largely on the legal, finance and financing aspects, including numerous fundraisings. At the same time he has continued to act as a hands on production accountant for productions ranging from £500,000 features to £15m series.
Outside the UK he has practical experience of working on productions in Malta, Belgium, Finland and South Africa. .