Architecture Firm Software: Complete Guide to Project, Team, and Client Management

An architecture firm is a professional-services business that happens to make drawings. The drawings are the deliverable. The business is the thing that decides whether the next project is profitable, whether the studio hires a third designer in October, and whether the principal pays themselves market rate or pays themselves last.

The fee structure is unusual. Most firms bill some combination of percentage of construction cost, fixed-fee-per-phase, hourly with a not-to-exceed cap, and the occasional retainer. Projects run six months on the short end and four years on the long end. Sub-consultants — structural, MEP, civil, landscape, lighting, acoustical, code, sustainability — pass through the firm's invoice with a markup, which means the firm is also acting as a general contractor for design services.

Layer on top of that the regulatory and approval workflow (zoning, planning department, design review boards, building department, client sign-offs at SD, DD, CD, CA), the multi-month time-tracking discipline required to invoice a phase, and the simple fact that every project has a story arc the principal needs to track in their head — and you have a business that punishes informality.

This is the complete reference. Ten workflows, what each one looks like in practice, what software handles it well, and how a 1-30 person firm should think about the operations stack as they grow from one project at a time to a steady pipeline of twelve.

These are not optional. A firm running without an explicit system for any one of them is doing it implicitly — usually in the principal's head, occasionally in a spreadsheet, and almost always at the cost of margin or sleep.

1. Business development and CRM 2. Proposal and contract with an AIA-style fee letter 3. Project setup with phase fee allocation 4. Time tracking by phase and activity 5. Phase deliverable management and client approvals 6. Sub-consultant pass-through billing 7. Invoicing by phase or percentage-complete 8. Project profitability reporting 9. Utilization and capacity planning 10. Post-project archive and lessons-learned

The sections that follow take each one in turn.

Architecture is a referral business. The cliche is true, and it is also the reason most firms underinvest in business development — referrals feel like they show up on their own, until the year they do not.

A functional BD system tracks every prospective project from first contact (a contractor mentions a developer needs an architect, a homeowner finds you on Houzz, a returning client emails about an addition) through proposal, contract, and project start. The CRM holds the contact, the source, the project type, the budget signal, the timeline, and the next-step date.

The most useful BD metric for a small firm is win rate by lead source, not lead volume. A firm with a 70% win rate on referrals from one contractor and a 12% win rate on Houzz leads should know that, and should be calibrating where the next hour of business development time goes. Without a CRM, those two numbers do not exist — they live as a vague intuition that the principal updates once a year over a glass of wine.

The proposal is where the firm's economics get decided. Once the fee is set, every hour of overrun comes out of profit. Once the scope is written, every scope-creep request is a negotiation the firm will mostly lose.

A proper proposal includes the scope by phase (Pre-Design, Schematic Design, Design Development, Construction Documents, Bidding and Negotiation, Construction Administration — the standard AIA breakdown, or your firm's variant), the fee allocated to each phase, the basis of fee (percent of construction, fixed fee per phase, hourly with NTE, or a hybrid), reimbursable expenses policy, sub-consultant arrangement (under your contract or under separate contract with the owner), and the assumptions that will hold the fee.

The assumptions are the underrated part. "Fee assumes one design review board submission." "Fee assumes two schematic options." "Fee assumes structural and MEP under separate owner contract." When the client asks for a third option or a second DRB submission, the assumption is the lever that lets the firm bill additional services without it feeling adversarial.

The contract that follows is typically an AIA B101 (Owner-Architect Agreement) or a custom letter agreement that mirrors B101's structure. Either way, e-signature it, store it on the project record, and reference it every time scope is in question.

The day the contract is signed, the project is set up in the operations system. This is not optional and it cannot wait — every untracked hour between contract and project setup is an hour that will be lost to write-off later.

Project setup at minimum captures:

- Project name, code (e.g., 2026-014), and address - Client contact and billing address - Contract value (total fee) - Phase fee allocation (the breakdown across SD, DD, CD, CA, etc.) - Sub-consultants engaged and their fee - Reimbursable expense policy and estimate - Start date, target milestones, and projected completion - Project team and their planned hours per phase

The phase fee allocation deserves a beat. An operator-typical breakdown for a full-service architectural commission runs roughly 15% Schematic Design, 20% Design Development, 40% Construction Documents, 5% Bidding and Negotiation, and 20% Construction Administration — though this varies by project type and firm, and you should calibrate to your own historical data. Some firms front-load Pre-Design as a separate phase; some collapse Bidding into CD or CA. The point is not the exact split. The point is that the split is decided up front, written into the contract, and tracked from day one.

Time is the firm's inventory. If you do not measure it, you cannot price the next project, you cannot judge whether the current project is profitable, and you cannot tell the difference between a slow week and a structurally unprofitable one.

The minimum useful entry has a date, a person, a project, a phase, and hours. A more mature setup adds activity type (drawing, meeting, coordination, site visit, redlines) and a brief note. The note matters less for reporting than for memory — three months later, when the client asks why CD took longer than estimated, the daily notes are the receipts.

Daily entry beats weekly entry. A designer who logs Friday afternoon will misremember Tuesday morning. A firm-wide habit of end-of-day time entry — five minutes, on the way out the door — gets you 95% of the accuracy you need. Approval workflow on top of that (timesheets reviewed and approved weekly by the project manager or principal) catches mistakes before they ossify.

The metric that matters at the project level is earned hours versus budgeted hours by phase. If SD was budgeted at 120 hours and you are at 90 with the schematic options not yet presented, you have a margin problem to manage. If you are at 110 with the client signing off, you have a cushion for the next phase.

Every phase ends with a deliverable and a client approval. Without explicit approval, the firm proceeds into the next phase carrying open scope from the last one, which is the second-most-common cause of fee blowout (the first is doing more options than the contract specified).

The deliverable list is small but specific: schematic plans and elevations, narrative, preliminary cost estimate at SD; refined drawings, key details, materials direction at DD; full construction documents and specifications at CD. Each one wraps with a written client approval — email is fine, e-signature is better, a meeting that ends without a written confirmation is not approval.

Approvals also unlock invoicing. A phase that ended without sign-off is a phase the firm should not invoice in full. A phase that ended with sign-off is a phase the firm should invoice the day the approval is in the file.

When sub-consultants are under the architect's contract (rather than the owner's), the firm acts as the contracting party. The structural engineer invoices the firm; the firm invoices the owner, typically with a markup of 10-15% to cover coordination and administrative overhead. Some firms pass through at cost as a courtesy; most do not, because the coordination is real work.

The operational rigor here is unglamorous and matters. Each sub-consultant invoice has to be reconciled against the sub's contract, paid on the firm's terms, then added to the owner's next invoice as a reimbursable or under the markup arrangement. Lose an invoice in email and you eat it. Bill the owner before paying the sub and you have a cashflow gap. Mark up against the wrong fee number and you owe the sub an apology and a corrected check.

The right system holds the sub-consultant contract, tracks invoices received against percent complete, applies the markup automatically, and ports the line items into the next owner invoice. A firm using a generic accounting tool for this typically rebuilds the math in a spreadsheet every month, which is slow and error-prone.

Two common patterns, sometimes mixed within a single project:

Phase billing. Invoice the full phase fee at phase completion (or at major milestones within the phase). Clean, easy to explain to clients, and ties cash to deliverables.

Percentage-complete billing. Invoice monthly at the percent-complete of each phase. Smoother cash flow, fairer for long phases like CD that span six months. Requires honest percent-complete estimates — overstate it and you create a write-down later.

Most firms use percentage-complete for long phases (DD and CD) and phase billing for short or milestone-driven phases (SD wrap, CA close-out). Some always invoice monthly regardless. The choice should be set at the contract stage and held to.

The invoice itself shows the project, the phase, the phase fee, the percent complete this period and to date, the amount earned this period, sub-consultant pass-throughs as separate line items, reimbursables, and the balance due. Net 30 is the convention; net 15 reads as aggressive in some markets and standard in others. Late payment terms (1.5% per month is a common ceiling, but check your state's usury limits) belong in the contract, not as a surprise on the second overdue invoice.

The number that matters at the end of a project is net profit margin — fees earned minus direct labor cost minus pass-through-net-of-markup minus allocated overhead, divided by fees earned. Many firms also track a more immediate realization rate: earned fee divided by hours-at-standard-rate. Below 1.0 means the firm gave away time. Below 0.85 typically means the project is structurally unprofitable.

A running report by project that shows budgeted hours versus actual hours, percent of fee earned versus percent of hours burned, and a projected end-state profitability is the most useful single dashboard a principal can have. It does not need to be fancy. It needs to be current within a week.

The projects that surprise firms are rarely the ones that came in late. They are the ones where the fee was set wrong in the proposal, and nobody noticed until CA was halfway done. A live profitability report makes that visible at week eight instead of month fourteen.

Utilization is the percent of an employee's available hours that are billable to projects. An operator-typical target for design staff is 75-85% (the rest goes to BD, internal work, training, and admin), with principals running lower — often 50-65% — because they are spending the difference on BD, management, and quality review. These ranges vary by firm size and culture, so calibrate to your own data.

The planning side asks the inverse question: given the projects on the books and the projects in proposal, do we have the capacity to deliver, and where will the bottleneck be? A capacity plan that maps each person's projected hours over the next 12 weeks against project demand surfaces the staffing question early. "We need to hire by August" or "we need to push the new project's start by six weeks" is a decision that should be made twelve weeks out, not the week before someone burns out.

The tooling can be simple. A spreadsheet works for a 5-person firm. By 15 people, a project management tool that lets you load each person's hours by week becomes worth its weight.

When CA closes, the temptation is to roll straight onto the next project. The 30 minutes a firm spends on close-out is some of the highest-leverage time it has.

Close-out captures: final fee earned versus contract value, final hours by phase versus budget, total sub-consultant cost, write-offs and write-ups, a one-paragraph lessons-learned note, and the final set of drawings and specifications archived in a project archive folder. The archive becomes the firm's institutional memory — the next time a similar project type comes in, the proposal can be calibrated against actuals rather than guesses.

Firms that skip close-out keep pricing the next project against vibes. Firms that do close-out keep pricing the next project against data, and the proposal win rate and margin both quietly improve year over year.

Most architectural fees are some combination of the four patterns below. Knowing which one you are quoting — and why — is the single biggest determinant of project economics.

Percentage of construction cost. Fee is set as a percent of estimated construction cost (e.g., 8% of a $2M project = $160,000). Historically the dominant model; still common on institutional and high-end residential. Strength: scales naturally with project size. Weakness: rewards the firm for cost overruns and penalizes value engineering, which is misaligned with the client's interest. Many firms now structure this as a percent of an agreed not-to-exceed construction budget, which removes the perverse incentive.

Fixed fee per phase. A negotiated dollar amount for each phase, totaling the project fee. Cleanest for the client; demands accurate scope and effort estimating from the firm. Most common on commercial and mid-size residential. Strength: predictable revenue. Weakness: scope creep without contract amendments is fatal to margin.

Hourly with not-to-exceed. Bill against hours at firm-published rates, with a ceiling beyond which the firm absorbs the cost (or triggers an amendment). Common on small-scope work, feasibility studies, and pre-design. Strength: fair on hard-to-scope work. Weakness: clients hate surprises near the NTE, and the firm has to manage that conversation.

Hybrid. A fixed fee per phase for the core design work, plus hourly billing for additional services, reimbursables, and CA visits beyond a stated baseline. The most common pattern in practice. Strength: flexibility without losing predictability. Weakness: requires disciplined time tracking and a client who reads their invoices.

Whichever model you use, the contract has to be explicit about scope (what is included), exclusions (what is not), assumptions (the conditions under which the fee holds), and additional services (the hourly rates that apply when scope changes).

Sub-consultants are independent firms, not employees. Treat them like vendors with contracts.

A few patterns worth holding clear:

Under owner's separate contract. Owner contracts directly with the structural engineer, MEP engineer, civil, etc. The architect coordinates but is not the contracting party. Cleanest for the architect's risk profile; common on larger or more sophisticated projects.

Under architect's contract, no markup. Architect contracts with sub-consultants and passes their fee through to the owner at cost as a reimbursable. Some firms do this to keep relationships clean; it leaves coordination work uncompensated.

Under architect's contract, with markup. Architect contracts with sub-consultants and passes their fee through with a coordination markup, commonly 10-15%. This is the most common arrangement on residential and small commercial work, and it compensates the firm for the real administrative load.

In all three cases, the architect coordinates the work, reviews deliverables, and is the single point of contact with the client. The contracting structure determines who pays whom and who carries the risk if a sub-consultant errs.

A separate note on staff classification: a junior designer working in your office on your projects is almost certainly an employee under federal and state law, not a 1099 contractor — and the IRS, state labor departments, and your insurance carrier will all care if you have it backwards. If you are unsure, the conservative answer is W-2. Bring in a CPA or employment attorney to confirm before scaling staff.

The pattern is consistent across small firms that grow well: the tools get more explicit, the principal's head gets less crowded, and the firm becomes a system that survives a busy quarter without dropping invoices or missing deadlines. The firms that struggle past five people are almost always the ones still running on spreadsheets and a principal's memory.

Most firm software stacks are a patchwork — Monograph or BQE for projects and time, QuickBooks for accounting, a CRM bolted on, DocuSign for e-sign, Google Drive for files, Mailchimp for the newsletter the firm publishes twice a year. Each tool is fine in isolation; together they cost $400-1,000 per month for a small firm and create reconciliation work every week.

Deelo is structured differently. CRM holds the prospect pipeline. Docs holds proposal and contract templates with merge fields. ESign captures client signatures and stores them on the project record. Projects tracks the project, its phases, and fee allocation. Time Tracker logs hours by project, phase, and activity. Invoicing pulls hours and percent-complete into phase or progress invoices. Automation routes the timesheet approval, the proposal-sent-to-signed handoff, the invoice-sent-to-paid follow-up.

The operational claim is straightforward: the same data flows through every workflow without re-entry. The client in the CRM becomes the contact on the proposal becomes the bill-to on the invoice becomes the recipient of the close-out email. The time entered against a project's CD phase shows up in the percent-complete number on the next invoice. The sub-consultant invoice attached to a project rolls into the next owner invoice as a pass-through line item.

Pricing is $19 per seat per month on the Starter plan. A 5-person firm runs the entire operations stack — CRM, proposals, e-sign, projects, time, invoicing, automation, plus dozens of additional apps — for under $100 per month, which is roughly the cost of one seat of most legacy AEC platforms.

The trade-off is the same trade-off Deelo always carries: it is not pre-configured for architecture out of the box the way a vertical tool like Monograph is. You spend a day or two setting up phase templates, fee allocation defaults, sub-consultant categories, and invoice templates. Firms that do that setup save thousands per year and gain a single source of truth. Firms that want an AEC-specific UI on day one are better served by a vertical specialist.