It has been a long and wonderful journey…
My fist experience of Filemaker was back iin 1991! Long befiore JRP was even a thought.
I had begun working in Film and TV as a special visual effects supervisor, and the first thing I noticed (apart from the quick-paced production lifestyle) was that communication and production was chaotic.
Everyone as truly a brilliant masters of their 3 skills and adept and several more … but on my! how the briefs, budgets and purchasing were in disarray as were the financials, timings schedule and documenttation (HSE), let alone invoicing .. it was a mess.
What was need was a workflow that kept records, historys and budgets up to date, daily.
I never thought oif myself as an accountant or overly concerned with finnacials, but what I did not like was disoganisation. Being a designer I was use to organising ng my time, my resources andplanning a workflow. This business was not different to that .. except it had 10 people running multiple projects each and all these ran of one bank account and onne signature … and that was more thn one human could cope with. We had to share responsibility and that meant knowing what resources we had to share; people, time, facilties and money.
This had obviously been done is businesses before but this was a team of creative and they responded to visuals, not spreadsheets, so what was needed was something that looked good and made sense in that way.
We needed graphics with clear pocket-money numbers…
Enter CLARIS Filemaker – Gamification of Accounting.
Filemaker was a share software on Apple Mac with a consistent way to display data (numbers finance) in a strongly graphic and engaging manner. It was a cros between Adobe Illustrator and Microsft excel … but being Mac UI UX it was super easy to use.