Lady Bacardi Media S.p.A

Lady Bacardi Media S.p.A is a global player in film production, creating films and documentaries that has captured audiences internationally.

Their work is so notable that prestigious film festivals around the world, including the Rome Film Fest, Venice Film Festival, and the Berlin International Film Festival have recognised LBM’s creative excellence.

LBM has even achieved, what some might consider, the most coveted award nomination at the highest level in its industry: the Academy Awards. Its projects were nominated in two categories: Best Original Song and Best Documentary.

Guided by a Hollywood-inspired business model and a strong commitment to promoting Italian culture, LBM is steadily growing. As many CFOs reading this will already know – growth comes with financial complexity.

We spoke to Alfonso Elefante, Production Accountant at LBM, about how the company managed large-scale production costs seamlessly with Soldo.

The challenge

As LBM expands its international activities and manages production costs for an ever-increasing number of large-scale projects, the company recognised that the potential for spending chaos was imminent.

Here’s how the company overcame several key challenges while trying to maintain financial control and efficiency across its film production operations:

Challenge 1: Accounting for dispersed spending across departments

Every department involved on LBM’s team – from set design to costume and technical teams – operates on the move. And each of them needs real-time access to funds to get their tasks done.

Whether it’s urgent material purchases for set design, last-minute costume alterations, or technical equipment rentals, unpredictable spending is the norm. But with limited visibility into how and when funds were being used across different areas of production made managing decentralised spend feel impossible.

The biggest threat of a lack of visibility: overspending.

Challenge 2: Preventing budget overruns in real time

LBM’s productions involve hundreds of people, all working together to bring creative visions to life. On the set of Ferrari starring Adam Driver, for example, the team managed 500 people.

At this scale, manually tracking spend as soon as it occurred is prone to error. But retrospectively reconciling receipts meant that financial discrepancies were often identified too late, leading to potential budget overruns.

LBM needed to maintain control over their budgets while ensuring that production schedules remained on track.
 

The need

LBM needed a spend management platform that could:

• Account for unpredictable and variable expenses
• Monitor spending in real time

The solution

To address the challenges of managing large-scale production costs, LBM partnered with Soldo to implement a comprehensive spend management system.

The key solutions provided by Soldo included:

• Production-specific wallets: A wallet for each of LBM’s film with precisely allocated funds based on individual project requirements.
• Department-specific payment cards: Separate Soldo cards, with designated pre-approved funds.
• A platform to monitor and control decentralised spend: One platform to oversee costs, even in projects involving hundreds of employees.

The impact

LBM’s team can now solely focus on the creative aspects of production.

“Soldo has enabled us to manage production costs in a much more efficient, faster, and easier way, even at the busiest of times,” Alfonso said.

Production-specific wallets help LBM ensure that spending remains within the limits of each project, reducing the risk of budget overruns and improving financial accountability.

“It’s helped us achieve more accurate and transparent cost management,” he added.

How are department-specific payment cards helping? Each team has the financial flexibility they need without delay. They can make the urgent purchases they need to, all while keeping expenditure aligned with the production budget.

Monitoring spend in real time has been transformative, making managing the complexities of large-scale productions easier. By identifying potential financial discrepancies early, the finance team can now prevent delays that would otherwise slow down filming or hinder essential purchases. Production timelines: uninterrupted.

With Soldo as a strategic partner, the company is well-prepared to face new challenges while maintaining strong control over production costs.

“Soldo is easy, fast, and friendly. It’s a system that is perfectly tailored to our needs and makes everything simpler and more immediate,” says Alfonso.