Everything KitSlate does, screen by screen.

The shape of the app

Two ideas explain nearly all of KitSlate. Learn these and the rest of the manual is just detail.

1. A job holds five documents

You never create a loose call sheet or a floating quote. You create a job, and the job carries five documents that share its name, client, dates, location and letterhead:

They feed each other. Gear you pick shows up priced on the quote; crew on the quote can be pulled onto the call sheet; the quote turns into the invoice; the call sheet's talent list fills the release.

The app calls this thing a job on the button, a project in the page title, and a shoot in a few older screens. Same object every time.

2. The company switch filters everything

At the very top of the sidebar is a list of your companies, each with a coloured dot. It is not a label — it is a filter that silently applies to Home, Projects, the Calendar, All Documents and most Reports.

• Single tap — a light switch. Turns that company's data on or off everywhere, without moving you.
• Double tap — "run everything as this company". The whole app now works as them.
• All companies — every light on.

The sidebar, top to bottom

Signing in

There are no passwords anywhere in KitSlate.

• Continue with Google — one click, straight in.
• Email link — type your address and press Email me a sign-in link. You get "Check <your address> for a sign-in link". The link expires shortly and works once.

You can also press Play in the demo sandbox — no account, which is the workspace every screenshot in this manual was taken in. It is pretend data you cannot break.

What signing in actually changes

The app works fully without an account — but everything saves into that one browser and nowhere else. Signing in makes your workspace live on the server, and the server copy becomes the real one. Sign in on a new laptop and your work is there.

Signing in is also what unlocks Messages, the Market, feedback, team seats, billing, and handing documents off to guests.

Two smaller things worth knowing: a brand-new account lands on Pick your plan before anything else opens, and signing out deliberately clears the workspace off that device — it is parked on the server and comes back when you sign in again.

Your first half hour

The app is most useful once it knows your gear, your people and your rates. Do these in order.

1. Set up your company. Settings → Companies. Name, address, email, phone, logo and brand colour. This is the letterhead on every document you send, so it is worth ten minutes.
2. Get your gear in. Inventory / Equipment. Add items by hand, or use Import / Export ▾ to bring in a CSV, an insurance schedule or even a photo of an old list. Set day rates as you go — they are what price your quotes.
3. Add your people. Crew → + Add crew. Role, day rate and contact details are enough to start; you can fill in tax paperwork and certifications later.
4. Add a client or two. Clients → + New client.
5. Book a job. ＋ New Job. Four steps, and it produces the gear list, call sheet and quote in one pass.
6. Export a backup. Settings → Data → Export backup (.json). Do this now so the habit sticks.

Home

The morning screen. What is happening today, what is coming, and what needs you.

KitSlate — Home

The chips across the top

Every one is a shortcut: "N shoots coming up" opens the Calendar, "N in storage · N out" opens the Inventory, "$X/day fleet capacity" opens Reports, and the Rate Guide chip opens the Rate Guide.

The panels

• Messages strip — only appears once you have unread mail or have sent something. Counts new, sent, opened and confirmed. Its border turns coral when something is unread.
• Mini calendar — the current month with a bar under booked days. Click any date to open it in the Calendar's day view.
• Today — cards for whatever runs today. Empty, it reads "A free day — or a good day to book one."
• Up next — the next six jobs. Each row shows a when-chip (TODAY, TOMORROW, IN 4 DAYS), the client, day count, location, the single next action in amber ("send call sheet", "pack gear", "invoice") or ✓ ready, and five small bars for the five documents. Hover the bars to see which are started.
• MY DAY — where you personally are: in the studio, on location, or clear. If you are committed to two places it warns "You're in N places today — check the clash below", then lists each room.
• Next 8 weeks — booked days per week. Hover a bar for the day count and the value quoted.
• Crew & catering — roster size and who is booked, plus a group-lunch card that becomes an Order lunch button once a call sheet carries an order link.
• Stats tiles — a Curious / Serious toggle. "Serious" gives you total income, booked pipeline, quoted-not-invoiced and average job value. "Curious" gives you the fun ones — your workhorse, your best payback, what never left the shelf.
• START SOMETHING — nine launcher cards for the things you do most.

Messages

Enquiries from your public page, replies to documents you have sent, and delivery tracking.

KitSlate — Messages

Inbox

Cards stay bordered in coral until read, and are tagged ENQUIRY or REPLY (a reply also says which document it answers). Each has Reply — an in-app composer that adds your company email footer automatically — plus Mark read and Mail app ↗.

Two kinds of message deliberately live elsewhere:

• Market enquiries collapse into a single MARKET pointer card and badge the Market nav item instead — they are kept out of your work inbox.
• Feedback threads with the KitSlate team appear as one card each, tagged FEEDBACK and KITSLATE REPLIED, opening a chat window with your screenshots attached.

Sent

This is delivery tracking, not a copy of your outbox. A summary strip counts delivered, opened and confirmed, then one card per document shows each recipient's status: Delivered → Opened → Confirmed. When a crew member taps the confirm link in their call sheet email, their row here — and on the call sheet itself — flips to confirmed automatically.

Projects & jobs

Every job as a card, with the state of all five documents visible at a glance.

KitSlate — All Projects

Each card gives you the name, client and date, the five document chips (coloured when started, faded when not), then the numbers: quote total, item count, crew count, "✉ N sent · N opened · N confirmed", releases signed, and either an amber to-do list or ✓ all done. Clicking the card body opens the Gear List; clicking a chip opens that document.

Booking a job — the ＋ New Job wizard

KitSlate — ＋ New Job

1. Shoot details — company (this sets the letterhead), client or — new client —, shoot name, date, number of days, In studio or Outside / on location, a studio room picker with a per-shoot rate override, and the filming address with a map preview. If the client has worked with you before, a Rebook their last shoot card offers Load it — just set the date →.
2. Equipment — kit cards, Start from a past gear list, Choose camera settings…, a searchable inventory, and rows for outsourced gear you are sub-renting from another house.
3. Crew — pick from your crew database.
4. Review & save — then Save booking — $X est. →.

Saving builds the gear list, call sheet and quote together. The studio choice becomes a studio line on the quote, and picked crew land on both the call sheet rows and the quote's labour lines.

Inside an open job

KitSlate — Fireside Chat — Ep. 4

The top bar becomes the document toolbar: the job name, the five tabs, then ＋ Add ▾, Options ▾ and the primary action. Options ▾ always ends with the same four items — ⧉ Duplicate project, Print / PDF — this document, Print all documents and Delete….

The PROJECT rail adds a ZOOM control (screen only — printing is always 100%), a DOCUMENT THEME Light/Dark switch that changes the paper but not the app, THIS JOB totals, and a live WHAT'S LEFT checklist that also surfaces crew whose certifications lapse before the shoot date.

⧉ Duplicate project copies every document and appends "copy" — and deliberately resets all packing statuses and clears call-sheet delivery tracking, so the new job starts clean.

Calendar

KitSlate — Calendar

Four views — Day, Month, Month + day, Year — plus ← → Today, a WEEK starts-on Mon/Sun choice, Calendars ▾ and Import / Export ▾.

• Returned jobs render outlined instead of filled.
• Imported events are dashed, in their feed's colour, with a start time.
• Days cap at three bars, then +N more.
• Clicking a bar opens that job's Call Sheet — not the gear list. Worth remembering.
• Clicking empty space in a day selects it and switches to Month + day; double-clicking opens the full Day view.

Calendars ▾ lists your companies and any imported feeds, each with a colour swatch and a show/hide toggle. Those colours affect the calendar only — document brand colours live in Settings.

Connecting an outside calendar

Import / Export ▾ gives you Import .ics file — one-off…, Connect live calendar feed…, Export .ics — subscribe anywhere and Export PDF — print this view.

All Documents

For when you would rather think in documents than in jobs.

KitSlate — All Documents

GROUP switches between By type and By shoot. In By type you also get filter chips — All, Gear Lists, Call Sheets, Quotes, Invoices, Releases. Each row carries a live status: "12 items · 8 in case", "6 crew · ✉ 4/6 confirmed", "KS-31 · total $4,200", "2/3 signed · 1 awaiting", or "not created — one click from the quote".

By shoot stacks the five rows under each job. The header expands a Summary & rundown ▸ in place — six KPI tiles, four status cards with Open <doc> → buttons, and the job's WHAT'S LEFT checklist.

How documents work

All five behave the same way, so learning one teaches you the rest.

Four ways to create one

1. ＋ New Job — the wizard. Produces the gear list, call sheet and quote together. This is the usual route.
2. The sidebar shortcuts — with a job open they switch tabs. With nothing open, Call Sheet / Quote / Invoice / Release open a blank draft with a strip at the top reading "Name this call sheet…". Gear List instead opens a chooser with a START FRESH form and a list of existing jobs to attach to.
3. From the Inventory — tick items, then use the bottom bar: Create Gear List →.
4. The quick gear list wizard — one form where the equipment can be your current selection, a saved kit, or a copy of a past gear list.

KitSlate — Quick gear list

After you save any document, a prompt offers the missing siblings: "<Document> saved — what else does '<job>' need?", with No thanks — I'm done.

Printing, PDFs and sending

• Print / PDF — this document prints the open sheet. Print all documents prints every document in the job, each on its own page — don't navigate while it works.
• ✉ Send opens the send drawer and attaches a real generated PDF. An EMAIL STATUS bar then appears on the document showing sent and opened counts, with ✉ View / resend.
• CSV is available for the gear list, the call sheet, and invoices in three flavours (QuickBooks, generic/Wave, and grouped by ledger account).

Gear List

What physically goes out, what it rents for, and whether it came back.

KitSlate — Gear List

The packing and return workflow

Every row carries four toggles — IN CASE ✓, RETURNED, MISSING, FAULTY. Click again to clear. These are not just marks on paper: they write straight back to your inventory availability.

Set GROUP BY to Case and the groups become case cards with a progress bar and ✓ all packed / ✓ all returned / "x / y packed" — which is how you pack a van without a clipboard.

The right-hand panel

• SHOOT NAME and rental income per day.
• PRICING TERM — Per day, Weekend, Week, Month. Standard rental maths: a weekend counts as 1 shoot day, a week as 3, a month as 10. Only the terms you enabled in Settings appear.
• RATES — WHERE IS THE GEAR WORKING — Studio / Outside / Rental. This re-prices every linked item from its three stored day rates.
• GROUP BY — Category or Case.
• SHOW ON THE SHEET — chips for Model, Serial, Case, Rates, Cost, Replace $, Purchased and Notes. Dimmed when no item has that data. These control what prints.
• ACTIONS — Export…, Add to Google Calendar, Expenses, Reset statuses.

＋ Add ▾ offers equipment from your inventory, outsourced gear sub-rented from another house (tagged OUTSOURCED and pushed onto the quote), and ↗ Hand off.

Call Sheet

Where everyone needs to be, when, and how to reach them if it goes wrong.

KitSlate — Call Sheet

What goes on it

In order: Job, Venue Name, Address & Main Entrance, Freight Elevator, Google Maps, Meeting Point, Point of Contact, Dress and Weather. Then the key-times strip — Crew Call / Shooting Call / Lunch / Est. Wrap, whose labels you can rename — followed by:

• CREW — crew, name, phone, email, call time, location, floor.
• SCHEDULE — time, activity, detail, notes, equipment. Plus + add next-day schedule and + add department note.
• + add talent and + add client on set — the talent list is what feeds the Release.
• SHOOT PLAN — cameras and audio, prefilled from the job's camera settings.
• Safety — Hospital, Urgent Care, Nearest Subway / Transport, Nearest Parking, and the confidentiality line.
• MEALS — GROUP LUNCH ORDER — paste a group-order link and an Order lunch button appears in the emailed sheet.
• NOTES and Walkie Channels.

Getting crew onto it

＋ Add ▾ → ＋ Crew — from your crew database… opens a searchable picker. Each person shows + Add · <their role> and, if they have one, a second button for their secondary role — that choice decides which rate the row uses. Two shortcuts sit at the top: ⇄ Everyone on the quote (N) and ＋ Blank row — type manually.

Type a name into a blank row and the app links it to your address book: if it matches someone you are asked "'X' looks like Y in your Crew address book. Link them?"; if it matches nobody, "Save 'X' to your Crew database?". Phone and email you type here flow back and fill blanks on their record.

＋ Add ▾ also offers ＋ Import call sheet CSV… and AI import — any production's call sheet…, which reads someone else's sheet and links the names to your crew automatically.

Sending it — and tracking confirmations

✉ Send to crew opens a three-column drawer: FROM (follows the letterhead), a TO roster with tick-boxes (a NO EMAIL chip flags anyone missing an address), and a live EMAIL PREVIEW. Press Send ✉ — N people.

It sends one email per person so nobody is CC'd, each carrying their own one-tap ✓ Confirm — I'll be there link. The CALL SHEET STATUS panel then tracks each person through Sent → Opened → Confirmed, and a CATERING — WHO'S EATING WHAT summary rolls up from your crew's dietary flags.

Templates and sheet types

Options ▾ holds SHEET TYPE — Shoot Day / Scout / Rehearsal / Travel Day — the letterhead picker, and TEMPLATES, where Save this as a template… keeps a layout you can load onto future jobs.

Quote

The price of the job, in five sections that each collapse to one client-friendly line.

KitSlate — Quote

Sections: STUDIO, EQUIPMENT, LABOUR / CREW, MISC and BANKING / PAYMENT FEES, each with a ＋ on its header. Every line has DESCRIPTION, DATE, RATE, QTY, DAYS, TOTAL and a ×; + details adds a notes block and a ledger-account picker.

Each section can collapse to a single line with ONE LINE / SHOW ALL — useful when a client should see "Equipment package — $1,285" rather than 30 rows. Hide empty sections tidies the rest away.

Pulling from the other documents

＋ Add ▾ → PULL FROM:

• ⇄ A gear list — priced items & kits
• ⇄ Call sheet crew — as labour lines

Crew lines, overtime and discounts

Crew lines show DAY RATE × DAYS plus an OVERTIME column (×1.5 = $/hr) and a + with gear / – person only switch for people who bring their own kit. Bill a line below its listed rate and you get a struck-through "listed" figure and an automatic DISCOUNT row. Percentage banking fees recalculate on the pre-fee total.

Options ▾ sets the equipment pricing term, PAYMENT TERMS (Due on receipt through Net 60), which sections and columns show, and links to ⚙ Quote settings for the defaults that apply to every future quote.

Invoice

A frozen copy of the quote, with its own number and date.

KitSlate — Invoice

You never start an invoice from scratch. Use → Turn into invoice on the quote, or click the greyed-out Invoice tab. With no quote yet, the tab tells you "Needs a quote first" and sends you there.

It takes its own number (KS-<id> by default), invoice date and terms. The quote keeps living alongside it.

When the two drift apart

Edit either side and a bar appears — OUT OF SYNC or BIG CHANGE — offering Keep them different, Save old as vN & push, or Push to invoice. Archived versions come back via Restore v1 · date.

Once you have imported your invoice list under Reports → Income tracker, the ACCOUNTING strip also shows UNPAID / PARTIAL / PAID, the amount paid, the due date, and whether the figure still matches the quote.

Release

A talent / appearance release for anyone on camera.

KitSlate — Release

The signature table takes talent name, role / character, email (for e-signing), signature and date. Each person has a Talent is a minor — needs a parent/guardian signature toggle that reveals a guardian row. An ADDITIONAL TERMS box prints into the body of the agreement.

Getting it signed

＋ Person — fill in or e-sign… gives two routes:

• Fill in here now — then Sign & adopt: type the legal name, pick one of three signature styles, tick the agreement, and Adopt and sign. This is the one to use with the talent standing next to you.
• Email the release — currently a prototype. No real email goes out; the row shows "emailed — awaiting" with a demo link that simulates them signing.

Handing off a document

Email someone a scoped fill-in form. No account, no app, no seat.

On the Gear List, Quote, Invoice or Call Sheet, ＋ Add ▾ → ↗ Hand off. One field — Their email — then Send the link ✉. They get an email with Open the <document> → pointing at a one-off web form.

Back in the job you see a HANDOFF bar: "Handed off to <email> — waiting for them to fill it", then "Filled by <email> — their picks are on the list below", with Resend / change and Hand off again.

Inventory / Equipment

Your fleet. This is the screen the rest of the app leans on hardest — day rates here become quote totals, and packing marks here become availability.

KitSlate — Inventory

Three ways your gear is organised

Adding and editing an item

+ Add item, or the + on any category header to pre-select that category.

KitSlate — Edit item

Beyond the obvious fields (model, serial numbers, location, date purchased, purchase cost, replacement cost, SKU, photo URL, notes), two things deserve attention:

The three day rates cascade

Rates — $/day, by where the gear is working has three boxes: In studio, Outside / on location and ShareGrid / public. Leaving one blank is deliberate — it falls back down the chain:

• A gear list at outside rates uses Outside, or falls back to In studio.
• A rental uses ShareGrid / public, then Outside, then In studio.

So you only need to fill in the ones that actually differ.

Links auto-fill

Paste a B&H or Amazon product URL into Links and the app tries to fetch the name, model and price. Paste a URL into ShareGrid listing and that alone is what publishes the item on your public page as kit for hire.

The row controls

Views, columns and search

• VIEW — Category / Location / Kits / Receipts. In Location and Kits views the location column becomes a read-only category label, so you cannot re-file gear from there.
• Columns ▾ — Serial, Rate, Cost and Replace $ each have three states, cycled by clicking: ✓ shown → ••• masked (values become dots — for screen-sharing) → – hidden.
• ⊞ / ⊟ — expand or collapse every section.
• Search gear… matches name, serial, model, location and category, and auto-expands everything while you type.
• Categories & Locations ▾ jumps to a category or location, and holds ⚙ Manage — rename, remove….

Selecting gear and bundling kits

Clicking selection bars raises a bottom bar — "N items selected", Clear, Bundle into Kit, Create Gear List → — plus a live GEAR LIST — BUILDING tray showing the running daily total.

Bundle into Kit (needs two or more) shows what is going in, then lets you tick crew and set their day rate to build an all-in package. The kit rate pre-fills with gear plus crew, and typing your own figure stops it auto-updating. Crew included in a kit land on the call sheet automatically, and the quote shows one all-in line with them marked "included".

× on a kit unbundles it: "The kit is deleted; your inventory items are not affected."

Getting your gear in — imports

Import / Export ▾ holds four ways in:

• Import CSV — understands KitSlate's own export and the original Gear List spreadsheet format. Column matching is fuzzy. Missing categories are created; items with no category become IMPORTED.
• AI import — paste an insurance schedule, an old spreadsheet or a rental-house list, or drop a PDF or a photo of one. Press AI read →, check what it found, then Add N items →.
• Upload PDF — turns a PDF's rows into the CSV importer.
• Import receipt PDFs — see below.

Tidying names afterwards

If imported names nearly match the shared catalogue, you get "Tidy up N names for consistency" with tickboxes, Keep mine and Rename ticked →. It changes only the name — but it is what makes your gear line up with Rate Guide benchmarks.

Receipts

VIEW → Receipts lists imported receipts with a storage meter. Drop PDFs and each is reviewed one at a time: editable order number, date, buyer, subtotal, tax, total, and a Payboo saved −$ field (B&H's card refunds the sales tax, so it counts as saved, not spent).

Each line offers ⚠ Update: <existing item>, Add as new item, or Skip this line. The promise is explicit: "Update fills price paid, date, SKU and links the receipt — it won't rename or move your item."

When a vendor's layout isn't recognised the receipt is still logged, and a banner offers Read it with AI → — any vendor, a few seconds, check the lines before importing.

KitSlate — Categories & Locations

Clients

KitSlate — Clients

The detail pane gives you New job → (starts a booking pre-filled with this client), ✎ Edit and Delete, a SHOOTS / BILLED / LAST strip, then sections for contact, billing, address with a map, FILMING LOCATIONS, REGULAR CREW, CAMERA SETTINGS, PREFERRED KITS, notes and past shoots.

KitSlate — Edit client

What a client record does for you

• FILMING LOCATIONS is derived from past shoots — you don't type it. Those addresses are offered back next time you book them.
• REGULAR CREW are auto-added to this client's call sheets.
• CAMERA SETTINGS presets load automatically on their shoots. The first one added is the default.
• Quotes and invoices pull their name, address and contact from here.

Importing clients

Import CSV — Wave / QuickBooks… needs a name column and maps email, contact names, phone, mobile, website, currency, account number and the full address. Existing clients — matched on name or email — are tagged EXISTS — WILL FILL IN BLANKS: nothing you have typed is overwritten.

Crew

KitSlate — Crew

KitSlate — Crew profile

The fields that matter most

• Employment — Freelance / Casual / Full-time. Choosing full-time greys out every rate field, and their quote line reads "Full-time staff — no day rate on quotes".
• PRIMARY ROLE — from a list of 21, or + Custom role… — plus day rate, rate basis (10-hour day / 12-hour day / other) and OT multiplier, defaulting to 1.5.
• SECONDARY ROLE with its own day rate. This is how one person can be booked as DP on one job and Operator on another, at different money — you pick which when you add them to a call sheet.
• TAX & PAPERWORK — tax ID type, employment type for tax, a Received W-9 toggle, and a drag-and-drop zone for W-9s, contracts and NDAs. Uploading a file with "W-9" in the name ticks the box for you.
• LICENSES & CERTIFICATIONS — type, name and expiry. Anything lapsing within 60 days shows amber; anything expired shows red.
• CATERING & DIETARY — tap-to-toggle tiles from a 17-item list. These roll up onto every call sheet's catering summary.

Camera Settings

Reusable camera-menu snapshots that ride onto gear lists and call sheets, so the crew shoots the right thing.

KitSlate — Camera Settings

+ New preset opens the editor inline. There are tiles for 19 standard settings — resolution, frequency, PAL/NTSC, shooting mode, picture profile, LUT, base ISO, gain/EI, white balance, ND, shutter, focus mode, SteadyShot, timecode, audio channels, proxy, scan mode and codec — each a picker with a + Custom… option. + Add setting covers anything not listed.

Auto-name builds a name from the main values, giving you something like HD / 29.97P / NTSC / CINE EI. Leave the name blank and it applies that automatically on save.

Attach to clients makes a preset load automatically on that client's shoots. A preset can belong to any number of clients, and detaching here also removes it from that client.

At the foot of the page, Custom values keeps every value you have ever typed into a settings field, as removable chips, so it reappears in the picker next time.

External Rentals

A ledger of your own gear going out to someone else — no job, no gear list, no call sheet attached.

KitSlate — External Rentals

1. Renter — who has it. Required.
2. Platform — ShareGrid, KitSplit, Direct or Other.
3. Start date, Days (in half-day steps) and Payout $.
4. Pick equipment… — each row shows the serial, whether it's already out, whether it's listed externally, and its external day rate. Close with Done — N items →.
5. A hint appears — "suggested payout $X", being each item's public rate × days. Optionally open More — status, fees, tax, deposit to match your ShareGrid statement line for line.
6. Log rental →.

Logging flips every picked item to out. Return on the ledger row puts them back in storage. Blank fields are filled in for you on save: end date from start + days, subtotal from daily × days, payout from subtotal − service fee.

Import rentals CSV… auto-detects a ShareGrid rental-history export, de-duplicates on rental ID, files rows as already returned, and matches items to your inventory by name.

Reports

Twelve reports in three groups. Every number is clickable and drills into whatever produced it.

KitSlate — Reports

Business overview

Shoots booked, days booked, total income, equipment revenue, external rental income, crew spend, misc spend, expenses out of pocket vs billed to client, and Cleared (income − crew − misc − expenses). Then the fleet row: items, fleet cost at RRP, fleet day-rate capacity (the sum of every in-studio day rate), in storage, out, faulty, and fleet paid off as revenue ÷ cost.

INCOME MIX breaks down where the money actually comes from — the studio, equipment, you working a role (split per role), and misc — read from each quote's sections.

Income tracker

KitSlate — Income tracker

Imports from a Wave or QuickBooks CSV, or straight from an invoice PDF. Every import shows a review screen first — "Nothing lands until you hit Import." Each row gets a — link to job — picker, and once linked the app compares it to that job's quote: "quote $X ✓ matches" or "— differs", with a PAIRED badge.

The equipment reports

• Earnings & payback — per item: times out, days out, cost, rented income, profit, paid off. Only items that have actually been on a booking appear.
• Gear status board — chips for Out, Faulty, Packed in cases, In cases & out, In storage and External rentals, plus "External capacity: $X/day if it all rents". The sidebar inventory counters jump straight here with the filter pre-set.
• Idle gear — priced but never booked. Capacity sitting still.
• Insurance & replacement — per category, with replacement value falling back to purchase cost. Print this one for your insurer.

Roster & catering is deliberately not company-filtered — it reads your whole crew database for employment mix, dietary needs, roles covered and W-9 status.

Only Income and Expenses have their own Export PDF. Everywhere else, use ⌘P — the tables are print-styled and the action columns hide themselves.

Public page & enquiries

Your "hire me / rent my gear" site, at kitslate.app/profile/<your handle>.

KitSlate — Public Page

You edit the content in Settings → Public page, then come here and press Publish page. What you control:

• The person — name, pronouns, photo, roles, personal bio, Vimeo, LinkedIn, Instagram.
• The business — location, contact email, company site, in business since, portfolio site, booking site, services.
• Company pictures — one wide photo per company. Drop a JPEG straight on the tile; it is downscaled and compressed on the way in so it fits the published page.
• Showreel — up to six Vimeo or YouTube links, mixed freely. Unlisted Vimeo links work — paste the whole thing including the private hash. Each field confirms what it recognised.

What a visitor sees

Hero and avatar, name and pronouns, location and member-since, a STUDIO or FREELANCE badge, your links, bio, a WHAT I DO chip list, a contact card with a map, the showreel grid, FOR SALE — ON THE KITSLATE MARKET (live listings, updating themselves), KIT FOR HIRE with a Request → per row, THE COMPANIES, then the GET IN TOUCH form.

An enquiry arrives in Messages → INBOX as an ENQUIRY card with their name, email and message. Reply from there and it sends through KitSlate with your company footer.

There is no client self-booking

Worth being clear about: a client on your page either taps Book the studio → — a link to whatever external booking site you configured — or sends the enquiry form. You reply, then raise the job yourself with ＋ New Job.

The confirmation page some people mistake for client booking is the call sheet confirmation link that crew receive by email: "See you on set?" → ✓ Confirm — I'll be there. Opening the link only reads status, so a link scanner can't confirm anyone by accident.

Two other public pages exist that you appear on automatically: the crew directory (every published profile, searchable by role, kit and city) and the used-gear market.

Rate Guide

What the industry actually charges — crew day rates, equipment rentals, all-in operator rates, studio rates and buy prices.

KitSlate — Rate Guide

Give to get — the opt-in

The whole guide is gated behind sharing. Opted out, you see a LOCKED badge and two buttons: Opt in & unlock and Settings →.

There is a master switch plus five per-category toggles — Share crew, Share equipment, Share op + kit, Share studio, Marketplace. Turn one off and that tab shows SHARE TO SEE.

KitSlate — Settings → Rate Guide

Reading a benchmark

Each row shows low → high with a common dot for the going rate, and — if you have your own figure — a marker labelled "your avg" plus "you sit +/−$X vs common". Below it, the provenance is stated honestly:

• ● LIVE · N shared rates — median X (lo–hi) — real pool data. Only appears once five or more owners have shared that exact item.
• Researched benchmark · reviewed <date> — hand-researched from public listings and union rate cards, with no live pool yet.

There is deliberately no fake sample size anywhere.

The five tabs

A WORK TYPE picker rescales everything — news, commercial, feature, streaming, documentary, corporate, music video, live event, indie. A universal search box returns matches across every tab at once.

Buy prices

KitSlate — Rate Guide → Buy prices

Each card can show a Community price (member submissions, with a range and a count), a List price (a researched reference, never counted as community data), Used here from real market sales, what it rents for, and how many are for sale used right now.

＋ Add a price takes the new/street price and optionally a product link it will try to read. Ask peers posts to a request board; replies arrive in your Messages, and a priced reply also seeds the catalogue.

Contributing

＋ Contribute my rates → pick equipment, crew or studio, set the work type and your city, build as many rate lines as you like with + Add, then Share N rates →. A Person with gear toggle files a crew rate into the op+kit pool instead, and ＋ Add my studio rate card pulls your hourly / half / full / buyout figures from Settings. Free-typed names that match nothing are flagged "new — pending review" so one-offs can't skew a benchmark.

The Market

Free peer-to-peer used gear between members. Listings cost nothing and KitSlate never touches the money.

KitSlate — Market

Listing something

＋ List gear for sale:

• What is it? — with catalogue type-ahead. Matching is optional, but it is what puts your listing on the Buy-prices page. Press Enter on a part code and AI resolves the full name.
• Asking price — the placeholder suggests the used median, or roughly 62% of new.
• Condition — Like new / Good / Well used / For parts.
• Details — what's included, hours, marks, box.
• City — prefilled from your studio address.
• Photos — up to 8. The first is the cover; reorder with ‹ ›. AI fill from photo reads your first shot and suggests the name, description and price — always check it. Images are downscaled and watermarked.
• Prove it — optional — upload the purchase receipt as a PDF. AI checks the product and buyer name and you get a VERIFIED BY RECEIPT tag. Buyers only ever see the tag, never the receipt.

Then List it →. You need a name, a price above zero, your first name set, and at least one photo — photo-less listings aren't allowed.

Messaging, and marking things sold

Message the seller → needs a free account. Threads live in a MARKET MESSAGES panel at the top of the Market page — deliberately kept out of your job inbox — with archive and delete per thread. Neither side ever sees the other's email address.

Mark as sold asks what it actually sold for, not the asking price, and offers to remove the item from your inventory (on by default). That real figure feeds the community used-price median anonymously.

What happens to an archived listing

Removing or selling a listing archives it. The record is kept for ever — title, price, condition, city and dates stay in your history, and a real sold price keeps feeding the anonymous used-price median.

The photos are deleted permanently 90 days later and cannot be restored. Photos are almost the entire weight of a listing and serve nobody once it has been off the market for three months. The clock starts the moment it is archived; relist inside that window and the photos stay.

Settings

Twelve tabs. You will spend time in four of them and never think about the rest.

KitSlate — Settings → You

KitSlate — Settings → Quote

Your data & backups

The most important section in this manual. Read it once, properly.

KitSlate — Settings → Data

Where your data actually lives

Everything — inventory, clients, crew, jobs, quotes, invoices, settings — is held in your browser's local storage as one blob.

If you are signed in, the same data is also written to the server a couple of seconds after every change, and the server copy is the real one. Sign in on another machine and your work is there.

Watch the sidebar strip. Saved to your account 5m ago is healthy. Saved on this device means you are on your own. Offline — saved here, syncs when back is fine and will catch up.

The routine to actually follow

1. Sign in. That alone gets a server copy of everything.
2. Leave cloud sync alone — it is automatic. ☁ Sync in the sidebar has a Sync now button if you want to force it.
3. Export a .json every week anyway — and always before a big import, a bulk price change, or anything on the Data tab's destructive list.
4. Keep exports somewhere that isn't this laptop. A backup on the machine that dies with it is not a backup.

Exporting and importing

Export backup (.json) downloads the whole workspace as kitslate-backup_<date>_<time>.json.

Encrypted sync without an account

If you are not signed in, ☁ Sync offers key-based encrypted backups instead. You are given a phrase like slate-grip-tally-274 under YOUR SYNC KEY — SAVE IT SOMEWHERE REAL, and your data is encrypted in the browser before it leaves. The last 20 backups are kept.

To restore on another machine: ALREADY HAVE A KEY? RESTORE THIS DEVICE FROM IT → paste → Restore →. This one does confirm first.

The destructive buttons

Plans, billing & team

KitSlate — Pick your plan

The free Market tier covers buying and selling used gear and nothing else — the production toolkit starts at Solo. What is genuinely gated: the company-profile cap, the studio features (Studio and up), bulk CSV export (Studio and up), and bulk import (Production House and up).

Checkout is Stripe, and Manage billing opens the Stripe portal for card changes and cancellation. In the sandbox nothing can charge you — the button reads Exit sandbox to subscribe.

Adding people to your workspace

KitSlate — Settings → Team

＋ Add someone takes their name and email, then WHAT THEY CAN SEE — nine permissions. Five are on by default: Jobs & documents, Inventory, Crew database, Clients database, Calendar. Four are off, three of them sensitive: Money, Crew rates, Rate Guide, Company settings.

They get an invite email with Accept your seat. It expires in 14 days and must be accepted while signed in as that email address.

Removing someone: "They lose access to this workspace immediately… Nothing they created is deleted."

Things that catch people out

Every warning in this manual, in one list. Worth skimming before you trust the app with a real job.

Data

• Signed out, your browser is the only copy of everything. Sign in, and still export weekly.
• Import backup replaces everything with no confirmation. Export first.
• Lose your encrypted sync key and the backups are unrecoverable by anyone.
• Storage caps around 5 MB. Receipt PDFs are what fill it. Heed the red banner.

Deleting

• Deleting from the Gear List tab deletes the whole job and all five documents. Every other tab deletes just that document.
• Deleting a quote also deletes its invoice.
• Deleting an inventory item or a camera preset happens immediately, with no confirmation.
• Deleting a category deletes its items.
• Deleting a client can blank contact details on an already-issued quote or invoice.
• Remove on a Market listing is public and immediate. Use Mark as sold for sales. The record is kept for ever; its photos are deleted after 90 days and cannot be restored.
• Profile and company pictures are deleted immediately when you remove them and republish — no retention window.
• Deleting a rental row before pressing Return leaves that gear marked out forever.

Things that overwrite or reset

• Reset statuses on a gear list wipes every packing mark and puts it all back in storage.
• ⧉ Duplicate project deliberately resets packing statuses and clears send tracking.
• A returned handoff overwrites, it does not merge.
• Deleting a linked equipment line on a quote also removes that item from the gear list.
• Changing the pricing term rewrites the DAYS figure on every equipment line.
• Hand-editing a camera-settings field detaches that sheet from its preset.

Things that don't do what you'd assume

• Sidebar document buttons switch tabs when a job is open, and start blank drafts when none is.
• Blank drafts you never type into are silently discarded.
• Clicking a bar in the Calendar month view opens the Call Sheet, not the gear list.
• Double-booking is a warning, not a block — and it covers gear and rooms only, never people, and never the External Rentals ledger.
• Calendar feeds are read-only in; the .ics export is a one-time file, not a live subscription.
• An empty page usually means a company is switched off in the sidebar.
• "RENTED INCOME" in Earnings & payback is internal booking revenue, not the external rental ledger.
• Inventory CSV import skips duplicates; Clients and Crew import fills blanks on them.
• Country selection changes the currency symbol only — it converts nothing.
• Publishing your public page is a snapshot; turning the toggle off does not unpublish it.
• The item quantity field does not exist — multiples are separate rows.

Not real yet

• Pay online — card / bank → on an invoice is a simulation. No money moves.
• Emailing a release for signature is a prototype — no real email goes out, and ✉ Send sends a copy, not a signing link.
• The release document is a template, not legal advice.
• Rate Guide figures are approximate community benchmarks, labelled with their source on every row.
• Team seats work, but the plan cards still call them "coming" and unpriced. Confirm the cost before adding people.