CASHét Entertainment has enjoyed impressive growth during the COVID pandemic. The company, which handles accounts payable services for film and television productions, has reaped the rewards of its move into an all-digital offering. That’s been critical at a time when the transmissibility of COVID-19 had productions looking for ways to cut back on the handling of paper.
“There’s been a very strong need,” says the company’s president and COO Paul Rogers. “Everybody was scrambling to find a way to go paper-free and we had a payables offering in the market that met that need. Soon pretty much everyone wanted to make that switch. You launch something and you think you’re prepared and then the boat starts to fill with fish and you have to deal with it very quickly.”
To meet the demand, the company restructured its newly launched CASHétPay division, which offers an all-digital way for productions to handle their payments.
More than 100 feature films and television shows, ranging from reality shows to big-budget productions, have signed up for the service. They include HBO’s “Westworld,” “Euphoria” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” as well as ABC’s “Home Economics” and Netflix’s “Dear White People” At the same time, CASHétPay expanded its operations, increased its staff numbers by 20% and promoted company executive Bill Phillips to vice president, payables. He overseeing the expansion of the company’s client and project roster as well as managing the execution of the CASHétPay services.
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Clients using the service include Warner Bros. Features and Warner Bros. TV, HBO, LG-TV, Lionsgate Features, AMC, Skydance, Endeavor Content, Turner, Tyler Perry Studios and Annapurna. Rogers says the service complies with all of the studios’ security requirements and allows them to pay their bills more quickly, which is a necessity in the fast-moving world of production.
“There’s a bunch of challenges in the production world that don’t exist in the corporate world,” says Rogers. “You’ll get a call saying so-and-so needs a check tomorrow or we can’t shoot in his driveway. The challenge is the immediacy and the complexity. Our company operates like it’s Production 101 — you find a way to get something done.”
To work, the production company sends a digital file with their approved payables to CASHet securely from the accounting software. CASHet identifies those vendors that can be paid by credit card (which creates a rebate for the production, important for tax credit purposes) and those that will be paid by traditional banking methods.
In compliance with studio security protocol standards, there’s a two-factor authenticated security approval process, which can be done remotely from any laptop or tablet. Eventually users will also be allowed to be make payments via a mobile device.