Spotlight: Paul Rogers, EVP, CASHét

When asked to describe his career path, Paul Rogers muses, “I’ve had an interesting life.” 
 
As a founder of CASHét, and now EVP at Entertainment Partners, Paul leads the industry's most widely adopted digital payments solution for film and television productions. But his path to get here has been anything but conventional. He's not a payments executive who wandered into entertainment; he's an entertainment insider who built the payments solution the industry desperately needed.

Royalties, rock songs and life on the road

After teaching himself programming to solve accounting efficiency issues early in his career, Paul Rogers landed a job creating a royalty accounting system for an international music royalty attorney. That role gave him his first real look at the entertainment industry's financial infrastructure, specifically, the headaches that surface when complex money flows don't have good systems behind them.

He learned a lot, then took a hard pivot, moving to Nashville to work as a professional songwriter. "In that time, I realized that programming and songwriting are surprisingly parallel," he says. "For both, you need a clear beginning, middle, and end—and it all has to make sense in the end."

A few years later, and compositionally wiser, he returned to his tech roots and took his first dip into the production world. This time, he built international film music royalty systems for a Dutch company whose clients included a who's who of independent LA filmmakers. He gained deep knowledge of film and TV production music and ancillary royalty structures, and collection—experience that would prove foundational to everything that followed.

His next venture, building a band-touring platform with a loadable credit card feature for independent musicians, sparked his big 'a-ha' moment. "That company didn't survive the 2008 financial crisis,” he says. “But the concept did.”

Rogers saw an opportunity: why not develop a similar payment system for film and television productions. He shared the idea with a former partner who had deep film finance connections, and discovered the right people were already asking similar questions. The head of Film Finances in LA had been independently circling the same concept; one introduction later, CASHét had its origin story.

CASHét was born in 2012, and Rogers moved from Nashville to Hollywood to build it.

The paper chase that plagued production finance

When Rogers and his co-founders laid the foundation for CASHét, they were focused on the scrappy, perpetually undercapitalized corner of the industry: independent productions.

"A new LLC might get formed on a Monday and need cards by Friday. But independent productions have no credit history, track record, or way to walk into a bank and open a corporate credit card. And at the time, pre-loaded B2B debit products barely existed," Rogers explains. "That left the one option that had existed since production finance began: use cash. But no one wants to deal with cash. It's messy and risky."

Every day, he saw production accountants struggling with the same problem. They had to keep tabs on department heads aggressively spending against limits no one was tracking. Receipts arriving in envelopes—sometimes labeled, sometimes not—had to be manually sorted, matched, coded, and entered into their accounting system.

"Throw a lost vendor payment check or two that need to be reissued into the mix, and you've got an exhausting cycle," Rogers says. "These accountants should be focused on high-value financial work. But instead, they're stuck chasing paper."

Building the solution, one accounting pain point at a time

Rogers built the CASHét PCard specifically to solve the cash problem—a loadable spending card with credit-card functionality that didn't actually require credit. For the first time, a brand-new indie LLC could open an account, load funds, issue cards to department heads, set individual spend limits, and see every transaction in real time.

"Being able to see every swipe was revolutionary at the time," Rogers says. "I was confident the accountants would love that." Hiring veteran production accountant, and former EP employee, Shawn Gillespie early on proved him right, and helped CASHét build solutions that reflected how accountants actually worked.

The envelope problem was next. Rather than chasing paper receipts all week, crew members upload them directly and submit a digital envelope for review. "Accountants approve everything without touching a single piece of paper," Rogers explains. "One of the most time-consuming parts of the job disappears."

On the vendor side, the problem was checks—slow, often lost in the mail, and expensive to reissue. CASHétPay made it easy to manage secure digital payments without requiring major changes to workflows, and it wasn’t just an efficiency gain.

"We pay as many vendors as possible by credit card," Rogers says. "Not only does it allow for better fraud protection, but it also increases cash rebates by 4-5x compared to check-heavy payment runs." A cost center turned into a savings mechanism.

Turning technology skeptics into automation evangelists

Creating the technology was one thing, securing adoption from a skeptical audience was another. Through the years, Rogers has found that many production accountants fall into one of three camps: those resistant to change, those who are delaying the inevitable, and those asking, 'Why am I still rubber-stamping this? There has to be a better way.'

Rogers is sympathetic. "There are technologies and applications that I don't want to change to myself," he admits. "I'm not on TikTok, and I don't plan to start now." But he draws a clear line between personal preference and professional cost.

"I've found hesitation is almost always tied to the transition, not the outcome," he explains. "Fear comes from having one more system to log into, and one more tool to learn. But after teams use our tools a few times, they wonder why they waited so long."

The time recovered from manual work, Rogers argues, belongs to higher-value things—catching outliers, managing vendor relationships, flagging budget risk before it becomes a problem. “In the best cases,” he says, "you get to go home at five o'clock, because you're not stuck at your desk, filing papers."

Preventing fraud before the first payment happens

As CASHét scaled from a card program into a full payables business, the stakes around security shifted dramatically. "People say, 'oh, you're in the payments business,' and I say no, we're in the vendor management and vendor validation business." The distinction matters because by the time money moves, due diligence should have already been done.

His advice to productions on how to stay safe? “When it comes to security, paranoia is a good thing.” CASHét has a dedicated team that validates new vendors, confirming TINs, screening against sanctions lists, and verifying bank accounts. “Once a vendor clears, any production in the network can pay them without starting the process over,” he explains. “That means we have a substantial validated vendor network that gets bigger with every production.”

From indie lifeline to industry standard: CASHét's big expansion

Thirteen years of consistent growth confirmed everything Rogers had long suspected: the cash problem wasn't indie-specific, and neither was the solution. "A wardrobe department that burns through its weekly budget on day one looks identical whether the production budget is $2 million or $200 million," he says. "The lack of visibility and reconciliation scramble don't disappear just because there's a studio logo on the call sheet."

“When the first major studio requested a PCard and vendor payment support, it was a big moment for us,” Rogers says. “Once we passed muster with a couple of big studios that have tons of checks and balances in place, we knew we were doing it right.”

Today, more that 2,500 independent productions and major studio productions use CASHét to manage production spend and vendor payments each year.

Integration and eliminating the reconciliation gapIntegration and eliminating the reconciliation gap

In 2017, Entertainment Partners and CASHét joined forces, and for the first time, accountants could push digital payment envelopes directly into EP's accounting software. Purchasing, vendor payments, department spend, payroll, incentives, and residuals all flowed through a single system—eliminating the reconciliation gaps that show up when those functions live in separate tools. Finance executives and unit production managers finally had full visibility into budgets and cash flow across the entire production lifecycle.

When EP acquired CASHét in 2025, Rogers had two conditions: existing clients keep full platform access, and new clients can use PCards, PCEDA, and CASHétPay regardless of which accounting software they use. His reasoning is simple: "Every production deserves access to the best tools to do their jobs well."

AI, compliance and the future of production finance

As productions increasingly become more global, so too must payment systems. 

CASHét partnered with Equals Money in 2024, bringing the full PCard and digital payments infrastructure to productions in the UK, with multi-currency support and direct accounting systems integration. But international expansion is just one piece of what Rogers sees as a much larger shift in how productions move money.

Today, he's focused on what comes next. "How can we do things better with AI tools and systems? Is there a faster, safer way to get people paid?" he muses. "I get to spend my energy on those types of questions now, which I really enjoy."

He's also thinking about compliance, which has shifted from a back-office concern to a front-line risk management function that digital infrastructure is well-positioned to address. Rogers sees AI as central to that future—not a replacement for human judgment, but a tool to surface anomalies faster across contracts, invoices, purchase orders, and vendor forms that currently require manual review. "If you employ it for good," he says, "AI can be really powerful."

His advice to hesitant accountants is simple: "Digital payments is not a technology decision. It's a time decision and a security decision—and if you get either one wrong, the costs are high. Let CASHét take the risk, pain and cost out of making payments”

Ready to modernize your production's payment workflow? Get in touch to learn how CASHét's PCard and digital payments solution can save your accounting team time and reduce fraud risk.