How scheduling works
The one idea that makes CrewGrid different — your timeline is a working draft, and it never changes your bookings or call sheets until you say so.
If you read only one concept page, read this one. It explains the single idea that shapes how the whole app behaves — and the one thing that surprises people coming from other tools.
The short version
Your timeline is a working draft. It never changes your bookings or call sheets on its own. When you're ready to push your plan out to the people you've booked, you do it in a deliberate step — and you always see exactly what will change before it happens.
That's the whole idea. The rest of this page explains why it works that way and what it means for you day to day.
Why CrewGrid works like this
Planning a production is messy. You move a shoot day, try a different order, split a unit, then change your mind twice before lunch. If every one of those edits instantly rewrote everyone's booking and every call sheet, two bad things would happen:
- People would be told about changes that never happened — every experiment would fire off emails and confuse your crew.
- You'd lose control of the truth — you could never tell whether a booking reflected a firm decision or a half-finished thought.
So CrewGrid keeps a clear line between the plan you're working on and the commitments you've made to people. You edit the plan freely. The commitments only move when you choose to move them.
Coming from a tool that auto-syncs?
The pieces
Three things work together. (Each has a short entry in the glossary too.)
1. The timeline — your working draft
The timeline is where you lay out the shoot: streams for each department, items for scenes and moves, locations, and links to the crew roles that work each stream. Edit it as much as you like. Nothing you do here touches a booking or a call sheet.
2. Snapshots — saved versions you can trust
A snapshot is a saved, named version of your timeline (or budget) at a moment in time — a bookmark. You might save one called "Client-approved v2" before making a risky change.
The key point: saving a snapshot doesn't send anything to anyone. It just freezes a version you can come back to, or build from later. See Timeline snapshots.
3. Re-seeding — the deliberate step that pushes your plan out
When you build a booking or a call sheet, you choose its source: the live timeline (your current draft) or a specific snapshot. CrewGrid then builds that person's schedule from the source and saves it.
From then on, the booking holds its own saved schedule. If you keep editing the timeline, the booking doesn't move — it's a commitment, not a mirror. When you do want the booking to catch up with your plan, you re-seed it.
Re-seeding always works the same reassuring way:
- You pick the source (live timeline or a snapshot).
- CrewGrid shows you a before-and-after table: every day that would change, with the old value and the new one.
- You decide whether to notify the person.
- Only when you confirm does anything actually change.
There is never a silent change. See Re-seeding bookings.
How you know a re-seed is available
You don't have to remember which bookings have fallen behind — CrewGrid shows you.
- In Staffing, a booking whose saved schedule no longer matches the plan is flagged as out of sync, with a banner offering to re-seed the affected bookings.
- In the Budget, the same situation shows as drift — an amber ⚠ chip on the affected line. Click it to see exactly how much the cost would change. See Allocated vs Actual.
- On a call sheet, derived sections show when they're out of sync with their source.
These are gentle prompts, not alarms. Being "out of sync" is completely normal — it just means your plan has moved on and you haven't pushed the change out yet.
Doing it all at once: Propagate
Re-seeding one booking at a time is fine when one thing changed. But if you've reworked the schedule and a dozen bookings and call sheets are all affected, use Propagate instead.
From the timeline, Propagate opens a single panel listing everything that's out of sync, grouped by how big the change is (a meaningful shift versus a cosmetic one). You review, select what to push, and confirm once. See Propagating changes.
What this means for each person
If you're a producer: plan boldly. The timeline is yours to experiment with. When a decision is firm, re-seed or propagate to make it real for your crew — and they only hear from you when you mean to reach them.
If you're a freelancer: the schedule on your booking is what the producer has actually committed to, not their live scratchpad. If it changes, you'll be told, and you'll see what changed. You won't get a flurry of emails every time they nudge the plan.
If money is involved: changes to a confirmed booking's rate or schedule don't just take effect because one side wants them to — both sides agree first. See Why some changes need both sides to agree.