Fee overruns show while you work, not at handover.
Every phase (schematic design, DTAC, PT, DE) has its own fee, hours and people. You see consumption as time is logged, while you can still talk it through with the client.
The problems every architecture firm knows
The project runs in phases, the tools don’t. That is how hours get lost and margins melt away.
Fee overrun, seen too late
You find out about the overrun at handover, when there’s nothing left to negotiate. The time to act was halfway through the phase, while there was still room to talk to the client.
Billable hours lost between phases
Timesheets in one file, fees in another. Hours worked never reach an invoice because nobody ties them to a phase.
Projects stuck on permits, people left idle
Permits and approvals can take months. When a project waits on a permit, the team either sits idle or gets moved around, and you find out late that nobody is free for the work that just came in.
Changes agreed by word of mouth
Change requests settled verbally become absorbed costs: extra work you should have billed.
Each problem, with its fix
Track every phase fee, week by week
You set up each phase as its own engagement, with its own fee and hour budget. Logged hours, valued in money, are compared with the fee as the work goes on.
See the overrun while there’s still room to talkBill by phase, in agreed instalments
On each phase you plan the invoicing instalments (an amount or a percentage, on the agreed dates), following the phased fee structure used in design work. From work in progress you prepare the invoice export for accounting, and logged hours stop going missing along the way.
Phase billing with no leakage See the modulePlan the team by phase and specialism
You book the team on each phase (architects, structural and building-services engineers) and see real availability: capacity minus leave and what other projects have booked. When a phase stops for a permit, you move people to another project. A plan that asks more of someone than they have available can’t be submitted.
Realistic deadlines, nobody left idle See the moduleHours over budget: you see them and decide
You see the hours worked over the phase budget and how much of them is recoverable. Then you decide: additional services agreed with the client go into the contract through a change order, with approval and history, or you write the difference off, with the reason on record.
Every hour over budget, a decisionFriday, the project review
You know the DE phase (detail design) is about 40% through the drawings, but logged hours already show 55% of the fee consumed. In FuseCRM you see consumption every week, not only at month-end.
You still have room to move: you pick out the client-requested changes that inflated the hours and put them into the contract as additional services, through an approved change order.
So the extra work gets billed instead of absorbed. That is the difference between seeing consumption early and finding it too late.
The bundle for an architecture firm
Professional Services
From the hour logged on a phase to the invoice export.
- Projects (planning & booking)
- Time
- Billing & Work in Progress