Basic
£1,828.00
APA pay and timesheet calculator
APA pay and timesheet calculator for UK commercial crew
Your APA day, totalled.
On iPhone it reads your call sheet and takes your wrap from the lock screen. Best Boy mode runs a department and makes its sheet for the production office, and your invoicing is set up after your first day wraps.
You know your BDR, your grade, what an L1 costs. TimeMachine already knows the rest of the APA terms. Put in your call and wrap; it calculates the day, catches the penalties, and carries the total through to a sent invoice.
TimeMachine is an APA pay and timesheet calculator for UK commercial crew, on iPhone and the web. It tracks call and wrap, calculates overtime and break penalties, and carries each finished day's total into an invoice. The APA rate card is built in, role by role, so it also works as an APA rate calculator. Best Boy mode tracks a whole crew's days together and shares them. It needs no account and works offline on iPhone. Built by a working best boy in the UK lighting department.
No login. Built for UK commercials.
The shoot, added up
One week, every day totalled.
A row for each day: the times, the penalties caught, and what the day is worth. The week's gross split into what it is actually made of.
Beacon Pictures
Lighting Technician · BDR £457 · week of 14 Sept
Week
£2,356.43
SHOOTMon 14 Sept07:00 → 19:00
OT 1h£525.55
SHOOTTue 15 Sept07:00 → 21:00
L1OT 3h£672.65
SHOOTWed 16 Sept08:00 → 18:00
KIT£507.00
SHOOTThu 17 Sept07:00 → 20:30
L2OT 2h 30m£651.23
Made with TimeMachine
APA Sept 2026
Every row is a day. Every chip is a penalty or an extra the app caught. The week's gross is not one number, it is four:
Overtime
£445.58
Penalties
£32.85
Extras
£50.00
Week total
£2,356.43
Four basic days, six and a half hours of overtime, a late lunch and a missed break, one day of kit. Sample figures on a Lighting Technician's rate, September 2026 card.
Day to paid
The calculation is the middle, not the end.
Most tools stop at the number. The job is not done until the money lands, so TimeMachine carries a day the whole way.
01
Call sheet
Read the invoicing details off it.
02
Track the day
Call, breaks, wrap, kit, mileage.
03
Calculate
The APA terms, applied to the day.
04
Timesheet
A clean day-by-day, PDF or text.
05
Invoice
Totals carried across, numbered.
06
Sent
Frozen as a record of what you claimed.
07
Paid
Tracked, and flagged if it runs late.
What it does
Four jobs, one app.
Calculates the day
Call to wrap on the APA terms: overtime grade, break penalties, weekends and nights, all worked out.
Makes the timesheet
A clean day-by-day you can send as a PDF or plain text, your name on top, the maths behind it.
Makes the invoice
Carries the totals across, adds VAT and your bank details, numbers it, and tracks it to paid.
Knows your role
Pick your grade and the right rate card loads, with the parts of the terms that apply to you.
Beyond your own day
Not just your own timesheet.
Three things the app does beyond totalling one person's day. See how it works.
Best Boy mode
Track a whole department from one place. Each crew member carries their own role and rate. The department day is set once and everyone inherits it, and anyone who worked differently gets an override.
Share a shoot by link
On iPhone, send a crew member their days as a link. It opens in their own TimeMachine ready to confirm, and the days travel inside the link rather than through a server. Up to 14 days per link.
Legwork, from Apple Health
On iPhone, with your permission, TimeMachine reads your step count and shows the walking behind a shoot day.
One real day
A day from a real invoice.
Lighting Technician, basic day rate £457, so a basic hourly rate of £45.70. Tuesday 4 August, a shoot day: call 07:00, wrap 21:00, 14 hours. Here is the whole day, and it reconciles.
Costed on the APA September 2026 card. Nothing here is rounded or adjusted.
Basic day10 worked + 1hr lunch · BDR £457
£457.00
Overtime, 18:00 to 21:003h at 1.5 × BHR (£68.55)
£205.65
Late first breaklunch started after 5.5h from call
£10.00
Missed second break30 min owed at BHR (£45.70)
£22.85
Day total
£695.50
Built for actual commercials
Different days, not one timer.
A TVC week is not a stopwatch with overtime bolted on. The days have different shapes, and the pay follows the shape. The app knows which day it is.
SHOOT
PRE-LIGHT
RECCE
PREP
TRAVEL
DERIG
OT
L1
L2
CWD
TOC
NIGHT
EARLY CALL
MILEAGE
PER DIEM
A travel day pays your basic hourly rate, on a minimum, not a flat day rate.
A pre-light day is eight hours plus a lunch hour, not the eleven of a shoot day.
A continuous working day starts overtime after nine, not eleven, and you can land on one without being told.
A night shoot is flat double hourly with a ten hour minimum, no overtime on top.
The call sheet reader
Your invoicing details, straight off the sheet.
The tedious part of a new job is retyping the same billing details. On iPhone, TimeMachine reads them off the call sheet for you. Six steps, and you check the result before anything is saved.
01
Email
The call sheet lands, as it always does.
02
Share
Share the PDF from Mail or Files.
03
TimeMachine
Pick TimeMachine from the share sheet.
04
Pick the job
New job, or add to an existing one.
05
Read
On-device, it finds the invoicing fields.
06
Confirm
Check the six fields, then save.
Confirm — 6 fields read
Job title
Beacon — Spot 2
Production company
Beacon Pictures Ltd
Job reference
BP-0242
Invoicing email
accounts@beaconpictures.co.uk
CC email
prod@beaconpictures.co.uk
Invoicing address
14 Wharf Rd, London N1 7GR
Six fields, and not the rest.
The honest version is the strong one. It takes what helps you get paid and leaves what would only mislead.
- It reads the invoicing details. The fields that are the same every day of the job and tedious to retype.
- It does not take call times. Calls are often individual and they change, so importing them would import something likely to be wrong. Entering your own call takes a second.
- It does not take wrap. Wrap on a call sheet is an estimate. The app assumes a full day with no overtime, and you set wrap when the day actually runs long. Wrapping early costs you nothing.
- Nothing else on a call sheet is any use for getting paid.
iPhone only. It works on any iPhone that runs TimeMachine, and it all happens on your phone: the call sheet is never uploaded. The web app does not have this.
Now, and next
Commercials now. Long form in beta.
The APA calculation is live and complete. Long form, for Pact/Bectu scripted TV and film, has been in the app as a beta since version 2026.11, and this page is where we say which is which.
APA · live
MMP · beta
TV bands 1 to 4 · beta
Beta means it calculates, but a few readings of the agreements are still unconfirmed, and the app flags them wherever they affect your money. When they are confirmed this page will say live, and not before.
The terms, explained
It does the sum, and shows its working.
TimeMachine does the calculation. These explain it, in plain English, from someone who has had to argue an invoice.
Who built it
By a spark, for the crew.
TimeMachine was built by a working lighting technician who got tired of totalling days on a phone calculator at wrap. Every rule in it is one that has cost someone money on a real job.
It is not a product with a crew theme. It is the tool the person building it needed, so the details are the ones that actually catch you out.