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Getting Started with Backscene

Backscene is built around how a shoot actually works: projects, locations, scenes, purchases, and items. If you've used a budget-first tool before, the mental model here is different — everything starts from what's physically happening on set, not from a line in a spreadsheet.

Your first project

Org Admins create projects from a brief, a script (film/TV), or manually — with a review step before anything is saved. Paths and plan gates: Creating Projects.

  • Upload a brief — treatment, scope doc, or production brief; Backscene proposes locations and scenes (Lite+)
  • Create manually — blank project; add structure yourself
  • Upload a script — film/TV; extract scene structure for review

The core shape of a project

Once your project exists, four things make up everything else:

Locations are where the work happens — a soundstage, a practical location, an office. Locations are org-level, meaning they live in a shared Locations Library and get linked into each shoot via Project Locations (see Organization Hub). If you shoot at the same warehouse twice, it's the same Location both times.

Scenes belong to a project and are the moments you're capturing — Scene 4, "Hero walks into kitchen," whatever your team calls them. Scenes can be tied to a Location. Deep guide: Scenes.

Purchases are receipts and spend. Every purchase belongs to a project, and can optionally be tied to a location, scenes, a vendor and be comprised of items. A purchase can be receipt-less — if you're logging something from memory or don't have a physical receipt, that's a fully valid purchase, not a workaround.

Items are standalone records — a name, quantity, unit price, and optional tags. They can be linked to a purchase, a location, or both, but neither is required. From an item's detail page you can follow any linked purchase or location directly.

Logging your first purchase

There are two ways in:

Upload a receipt. Drop in a photo or PDF and Backscene's AI reads it — vendor, date, total, and individual line items all get pulled out automatically. You'll see the receipt image next to the parsed data so you can check everything against the original before confirming. Nothing submits until you say so.

Log it manually. No receipt, or you're entering from memory — that's fine. You can log just the vendor and total in seconds, or add line items if you have the breakdown. Partial information is genuinely useful; you don't need a complete record to make a purchase worth logging.

Either way, you'll land on a summary screen before anything is created. Check it, go back and fix anything that's off, then confirm.

Roles, in short

Backscene has three roles: Admin, Editor and Viewer. Admins manage the org and have full access everywhere. Editor users can create and edit purchases and items on projects they're part of. Viewers can see everything they have access to but can't create or edit anything — they're read-only by design.

Roles can also be set per-project, so someone can be a Editor user org-wide but an Admin on one specific project (or vice versa). See the Roles & Permissions doc for the full breakdown.

Where to go next