Take, for example, a perfectly middle-of-the-road $4 million picture.
Beyond all of the hiring and casting that goes on, you have for example wardrobe, set decoration and set construction departments.
And it is perfectly reasonable to expect the eleven (or so) different departments behind the film to spend upwards of $30-40 thousand dollars, in cash and CC, every single week – consistently, for several months. Across multiple different shooting locations.
As a result, the CPAs and bookkeepers in my business were spending all of their time pushing paper and doing data entry – printing forms and manually filling them out, more often than not!
I had to devote more of my staff to each project, settle for lower productivity, and subject some of my best people to carpal tunnel, just to handle the demands of it all.