Cash Flow
You can put the production's events on the plan, and you know why moving one moves the money.
**Milestones** in the rail puts the production's events onto the plan — start of shoot, wrap, delivery — so a period column is not just a date but a moment in the production.
Cash flow is only interesting relative to what the production is doing. *Negative €300,000 in week 14* means nothing on its own; *negative €300,000 in the last week of the shoot* is a specific, actionable problem.
The markers are what turn the plan into a document a producer can reason about.
This is the load-bearing fact, and it is the reason to anchor rules to milestones wherever you can.
A milestone is stored as an **offset** in the schedule rather than a fixed calendar date. So when the shoot moves two weeks later:
- the milestone moves; - every cash-flow rule anchored to it moves; - every amount those rules place moves; - and this plan redraws.
One edit to the schedule, and the budget, the financing plan and the cash flow all stay consistent. See the budgeting manual's [what phases and milestones are](/kb/article/what-phases-and-milestones-are).
A rule pinned to a calendar date does not follow the production. It is the kind of rule that ends up pointing into the past with nothing paid against it — exactly what [fix an outdated cash flow rule](/kb/article/fix-an-outdated-cash-flow-rule) is about.
Use milestones for anything that follows the schedule. Keep fixed dates for things that genuinely do not move: an insurance premium, a loan repayment, a rent.
They live in the budget's **Timeline**, along with the phases. They are shared by every module, which is what makes one schedule change propagate everywhere.
Markdown