Field notes · Outpost VFX
At a 3.6% EBITDA margin, one point of labour efficiency is worth a quarter of the year's profit.
Outpost's FY26 accounts tell a recovery story: revenue back to £29.9m, a clean audit opinion, and staff costs at their lowest share of revenue in six years. They also show how little room there is. I read every set of group accounts since FY19, the peer filings and the incentive rules. Then I built the reporting a studio like this runs on (the weekly show P&L, the bench view, the bid model, the payroll journal) on a synthetic studio sized to Outpost's accounts.
The case in six numbers
Each one links to where it is worked out. Labels show how each number was obtained: Reported from a filing, Calculated from reported figures.
FY26 group revenue, with EBITDA of £1.06m and the first audit opinion without a going-concern material uncertainty since FY22.Reported
The numbers → The leverWhat one point of staff cost as a share of revenue is worth at FY26 scale: 28% of the year's EBITDA. Staff costs were 64.6% of revenue.Calculated
Why labour is the P&L → MixUK-billed share of revenue, FY25 to FY26. UK headcount rose from 108 to 152 while the group stayed at 414.Reported
What moved → IncentivesThe line Mumbai pricing has to beat for a UK client to save money, now that UK VFX spend earns the client 29.25% net.Calculated
Site mix is pricing → PeersStaff cost as a share of revenue: Outpost FY26 against Framestore's UK company in 2025. Cinesite's group ran at 96% in its bad year.Calculated
Peer filings → Finance DailiesFrom ShotGrid, ftrack, three payrolls, Xero and AWS to a weekly show P&L, with 15 data checks that run on every build.
Finance Dailies →In short
What the numbers say
The recovery came from volume and UK mix; the next EBITDA point comes from hours. FY26 revenue rose 26% on flat headcount. With EBITDA at 3.6%, the remaining levers are labour: how many paid hours reach a show, and how many hours a shot takes against its bid. Both are measurable every week from ShotGrid and payroll.
Site mix is now a pricing decision, not just a cost one. UK VFX spend earns the client 29.25% net from 2025; Mumbai work is deducted from that claim. So Mumbai only saves the client money below 70.75% of the UK price, and the bench risk moves to whichever site the incentives disfavour. That needs a number in every bid.
Margin erosion should show up in week six, not at delivery. A weekly estimate-at-completion per show, with a bridge that says why it moved (department CPI, currency, scope, cloud), turns "the show went over" into a conversation with the producer while there is still time to act.
The foundation is one set of definitions and a pipeline nobody has to babysit. Utilisation, bench, realised rate and show margin defined once, built automatically from ShotGrid, HR, payroll and Xero, with checks that catch the broken email match or the missing tracking code before the numbers go out.
What this site is
Two parts
- The research. Outpost at 14 reads six years of group accounts. The VFX business covers bidding, incentives, peers and the 2023–26 shake-out.
- The reporting. Finance Dailies runs on a simulated studio: 4 sites, about 430 people, 16 shows, two years of timelogs. How it works explains how it was built and calibrated.
Nothing here uses Outpost's internal data. The research is from public filings and press; Finance Dailies' data is generated, then calibrated so its FY26 lands near the filed accounts. It is sized like Outpost, but it is not Outpost.
Finance Dailies
The Monday pack for a four-site studio
Raw exports from ShotGrid, ftrack, three payrolls, Xero and AWS go into a SQL warehouse (DuckDB), then into the screens below. The same tables can be queried in the browser on the data page.
- Show P&L with a weekly margin bridgeEAC, percentage-of-completion revenue, CPI by department, unsigned change orders
- Utilisation, bench and 13-week capacityby site and department, permanent vs freelance
- Bid builderrate card in, the studio's own overrun history out, client net cost after UK relief
- Payroll in three currencies, Xero journals outUK, Québec and India on-costs; labour allocated to shows
- Data checks, KPI dictionary, SQL explorer15 tests, 20+ KPIs, 60+ queryable tables
Twelve things about Outpost worth putting side by side
All public, all cited on the sources page.
1. The company is older than the brand
Outpost VFX Ltd was incorporated on 13 November 2012; the studio says "since 2013". Duncan McWilliam, a former MPC VFX supervisor, started it in Bournemouth because it was cheaper than Soho and close to Bournemouth University's VFX courses.
2. Montréal came first
The first international studio opened in Montréal in early 2019, for Québec's tax credits. A Singapore hub followed in July 2019 and later disappeared from the studio list. LA opened in 2021 and closed in the 2023 reset.
3. Mumbai started remote
About 60–80 Mumbai artists worked from home on Foundation, The Wheel of Time and Picard in 2021, before the Goregaon office existed. It went on to win an ET Human Capital Gold award for remote-work management.
4. 950 to 250 in three months
The CEO has said global headcount fell from about 950 to 250 during the 2023 strikes. Average group headcount was 687 in FY24, 413 in FY25 and 414 in FY26.
5. Paid overtime at 1.5×
Outpost introduced 1.5× paid overtime in the UK from September 2021 and extended it to Mumbai, which is rare in VFX. It makes overtime a visible cost, and a measurable one.
6. Fully on AWS since 2023
About 1,000 users moved to AWS in two and a half months: virtual workstations, Deadline render and WEKA storage. Infrastructure went from capex to opex, so cloud is now a cost that can be traced to each show.
7. Face-swap training, 8× faster
With the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, Outpost moved its face-replacement model to multi-GPU training on H100s. First client versions went from 1–2 weeks to 2 days.
8. Two Best VFX Oscar nominees in one year
Sinners and The Lost Bus. Four Outpost films made the longlist and three the shortlist, which Outpost says made it joint-second among all vendors.
9. #42 to #4
Televisual's Facilities 50 ranked Outpost 42nd on entry in 2017 and 4th in the December 2025 edition, a year in which several larger UK names closed.
10. Mumbai is a cost-plus captive
The Indian company is described in the accounts as "a service company to all group studios". Aggregated filings put its FY25 revenue at about ₹35 crore with a margin consistent with a cost-plus mark-up of about 16%.
11. Funded by investors, not banks
YFM Equity Partners' funds hold all the preferred shares. The FY26 accounts report no senior bank lending; YFM has confirmed it won't seek repayment of its loan notes for at least 12 months.
12. The board's stated target is EBITDA, not growth
The FY26 strategic report says revenue growth will not be "prioritised at the expense of margin or cash discipline", and the income statement now shows EBITDA on its face.