Tubes is a production management platform for film, television, commercials and live entertainment. It replaces the spreadsheets and separate tools that most production companies use for budgeting, scheduling, cost control, approvals and reporting with one connected system.
Everything starts with a project
A project is the home of one production. Its budgets, planning, team, documents and costs all live there. Start with a project, and everything else in Tubes builds on it.
Each project has two tabs:
- Budgeting is where you build and manage budgets, set up budget lines, templates and price lists, and publish the approved budget to the production team.
- Production is where you track progress, manage crew and operations, plan days and follow the costs.
Three phases: Budget, Plan, Produce
Tubes follows the life of a production:
- Budget. Build the budget from a template, a copy of an earlier budget or an AI draft. Turn it into a quotation for your client. Compare versions. Publish the approved budget.
- Plan. Every budget header becomes an activity in the planning. Give activities their days, people, items and locations. Send call sheets and collect crew confirmations.
- Produce. Invoices, receipts and other transactions come in, are read by OCR, matched against the budget and routed through approval. The forecast shows cost to date, committed costs and the expected final cost per cost type.
Because every person, location or item you plan is a budget line, and every invoice is linked to a cost type, the budget, the planning and the books always describe the same production.
Where things are
The sidebar on the left holds the main screens. You can choose between two layouts under Preferences: Classic (Overview and Lists) or Concept (Budget, Plan, Produce). See Find your way around.
Tip: Not sure where to start? Open the Help button in the sidebar and ask the Tubes assistant a question, such as "How do I build a budget in Tubes?"