How to Track Architecture Project Phases and Billable Hours

Most professional services firms track time against a project. Architecture firms have a stricter problem: hours have to be tagged to a specific phase, not just a job number. Schematic Design and Construction Administration are not the same work, do not bill at the same point, and rarely have the same fee allocation. A firm logging 80% of its hours to a generic "general" bucket is leaking money, and it will not know by how much until the project closes.

This guide is for principals and project managers at architecture firms of 1 to 30 people who already know they need phase-tagged time tracking but are not sure what the workflow should actually look like day to day. We will walk through the AIA phase model, the 6-step process from project setup to phase-profitability reporting, utilization targets that match how working architects actually bill, and the four pitfalls that turn a profitable schematic design into a money-losing construction administration phase.

In a typical agency or consultancy, the unit of work is the engagement. Hours roll up to a project; the project has a fee; you compare the two and the math is clean. Architecture does not work that way. The fee is allocated across distinct phases, each phase has its own deliverables and its own percent-complete invoicing schedule, and the workload distribution across phases is wildly uneven. Schematic Design might be 15% of the fee but feels like 25% of the effort; Construction Administration is often 20-25% of the fee and runs over the longest calendar window with the most uncontrolled scope.

If you are not tagging time to phase, five things break.

The American Institute of Architects has a standard breakdown of services that almost every firm uses as a reference, even when contracting on a custom basis. The phases below — and the fee allocations — are operator-typical for owner-direct architectural services. Your actual splits will vary by project type, contract form (B101, B102, B103), whether you carry interior design or landscape, and how you handle CA. Use these as a starting baseline, not a rule.

Two things to flag. First: if your firm regularly does fast-track work, design-build, or IPD (Integrated Project Delivery), these phases overlap and the fee allocation looks different — sometimes radically. Second: many firms break out Pre-Design (programming, feasibility) as a separate phase billed hourly with no fee allocation, because it precedes the owner committing to construction.

Here is the end-to-end process. You can implement this in any time tracking tool that supports project-and-phase hierarchies, but the steps are tool-agnostic.

When a project is awarded, the principal or PM creates the project record before anyone logs an hour. The setup includes the total fee, the phase breakdown with allocated dollars (not just percentages — convert them once, store both), the contract type, and the sub-consultant fees that pass through. Each phase gets a hours-budget calculated from the fee at the firm's blended rate, with a contingency carve-out — typically 5-10% — held back at the project level, not distributed across phases.

A $240,000 fee split 15/20/40/5/20 means SD has $36,000 of budgeted fee. At a $185 blended billing rate, that is roughly 195 hours for SD. The system should display that target so anyone logging time can see it.

Phases do not float forever. When SD is approved by the owner, the PM closes the SD phase in the system. From that point, time logged to SD requires a comment explaining why (almost always: a late owner change, which should trigger an additional services conversation). DD is opened the same day. This sounds bureaucratic; it is the single highest-leverage discipline in phase tracking. Firms that close phases on time know within a week when a phase is bleeding. Firms that leave every phase open until the project closes find out at the disbursement meeting.

The close-out gate is also the moment to reconcile the fee — if SD ran over by 30 hours and there was no additional services agreement, those 30 hours come out of the project contingency. Document it.

Every time entry needs three tags: project, phase, and activity. "Activity" is the work category — drafting, coordination, owner meeting, code review, site visit, redlines, internal review. Most firms get away with 8-15 activity codes; more than that and people stop being consistent.

Do not let people log a half-day to "project work, general." That single habit destroys the data. Build it into onboarding: every hour has a phase tag, no exceptions, and the principal reviews any "general / unallocated" line on the Monday utilization report.

Daily entry is non-negotiable. Friday-afternoon recall of Monday's hours is a fiction; people round, they guess, they miss the meeting that ate 90 minutes. A firm of 10 architects logging time accurately recovers roughly 2-4% of revenue compared to a firm that backfills on Fridays — that is a few thousand dollars of additional fee per architect per year that was already worked but never billed.

Every Monday, the PM or principal runs a 15-minute report: hours by person, by project, by phase, week over week. Two questions matter. First, what is each architect's billable utilization for the prior week? Second, for every active phase, what is the percent of budgeted hours consumed versus the percent of deliverables complete?

When a phase is at 70% of hours but 40% of deliverables, that is a scope conversation with the owner, not an internal pep talk. The earlier you have it, the cheaper it is. Friday afternoon of week three beats Monday morning of month three by an order of magnitude.

Architecture invoices are not "hours times rate" the way a law firm bills. They are "percent complete of this phase, applied to the phase's fee allocation, minus prior billed." That means your invoicing system needs to know, per project, the fee per phase, the prior billed amount per phase, and the current percent-complete per phase.

The time data feeds the percent-complete number, but it should not equal it. Hours logged is an input the PM uses to estimate percent-complete; the final invoice number is a judgment call by the PM, signed off by a principal, sent to the owner. Some firms invoice monthly; some invoice on phase close; the AIA G702/G703 forms are the industry standard for the larger projects that warrant them.

Sub-consultants are billed as a pass-through line item with markup (typically 10-15%, contract-dependent). Track them as their own line on the invoice, never bundled into the phase fee, or you will lose the markup math.

When the project closes, run the per-phase profitability report. Hours logged times the blended rate gives you the cost-to-complete; phase fee minus that cost is the per-phase margin. Aggregate this across your last 8-12 projects and you will see structural patterns.

Most firms find the same thing: SD and DD are profitable, CD is roughly break-even, and CA is a loss. Once you have that data across a portfolio, you can negotiate fee splits differently on the next contract, or you can refuse certain CA scope without an hourly cap. Without the data, you are guessing — and most firms guess in favor of the client, because that is what the conversation defaults to.

Billable utilization in architecture trends lower than in consulting or law. Operator-typical numbers:

These targets are starting points. A firm doing high-volume tenant interiors will run higher utilization than a firm doing custom residential or large institutional work, because the project mix forces it. The point is to set a target, measure against it weekly, and have a conversation when reality diverges.

Deelo's Time Tracker, Projects, and Invoicing apps connect to handle the workflow above without a separate platform for each step. In Projects, every architecture project gets a phase breakdown — SD, DD, CD, Bidding, CA, plus any Pre-Design or Additional Services buckets you carry. Each phase stores its fee allocation, hours budget, and open/close status as first-class fields.

Time Tracker entries require a project and a phase tag. The phase dropdown only shows open phases, which enforces the close-out gate from Step 2. Activity codes are configurable per firm. The weekly utilization view groups hours by person, project, and phase, with a phase-burn percentage that compares hours logged to hours budgeted.

Invoicing supports percentage-complete invoicing tied to phase fees. When you draft an invoice, you select the project, set percent-complete per active phase, and the system calculates the current bill minus prior billed. Sub-consultants are line items with configurable markup. The AI assistant can draft a phase close-out memo from the hours data, which a principal reviews before sending.

At $19/seat/month, a 10-person architecture firm runs Projects, Time Tracker, Invoicing, CRM, Docs, and ESign for $190/month — usually less than the cost of a single specialized architecture time-tracking platform. The trade-off is that Deelo is not pre-configured with the AIA G702/G703 templates the way a dedicated architecture tool is; you set those templates up once in Docs, and from then on the workflow runs.

If your firm is not currently phase-tagging time, here is the smallest possible starting move. Pick your next project. Set up the five phases with fee allocation and hours budget. Require every time entry from day one to carry a phase tag. Run the weekly utilization and phase-burn review every Monday for the project's duration. At project close, calculate per-phase margin.

You will see two things by month three. First, where your firm is structurally losing money. Second, which architect is the best at flagging scope creep before it becomes irrecoverable. Both of those are worth more than the tooling cost in the first project alone.