The project and fee system that tells your practice what to invoice

A typical business running one of these has 10 to 60 staff in one or two studios and 40 to 150 live projects at different stages. Fees are a lump sum split across the work stages, a percentage of the construction cost, or hourly for small jobs. Everyone fills in a timesheet by project and stage each week, invoices go out monthly against how far each stage has got, and the directors keep a plan of who works on what.

The drawings are made in design software the practice buys, and most practices this size buy their accounts package too. This page is about the system between the two, which small and mid-size practices have often built for themselves. Whether a partner built it in 2005 or a freelancer in 2019, it does the same work.

In the office manager's words, it holds the project register (client, site, appointment, fee basis, stages, team), produces fee proposals, takes the weekly timesheets, sets time cost against fee earned for each stage, drafts the invoices, records additional services and fee variations, carries the planning application and appointment dates, keeps the CPD records, and holds the resourcing plan by person and week.

The rules in it are the practice's own:

• A stage is invoiced by the percentage the project architect marks complete, and never past 100 per cent until a fee variation is agreed.
• Additional services are recorded separately and not invoiced until the client has agreed them in writing.
• Timesheets lock each Monday, and late time goes through the office manager.
• Each grade has a cost rate, set each April, and time cost against fee is worked from it.
• A percentage fee is recalculated when the cost plan changes, not when the tender comes back.

None of it is in the staff handbook. It is in how the fee screen behaves.

Built somewhere between 2002 and 2012, and which version a practice has tends to follow its computers. In a studio of Macs, a partner with a feel for databases built it in FileMaker: a layout for projects, one for timesheets, and a fee screen that came later. In a Windows office a contractor wrote it in Microsoft Access, and when the file slowed under years of timesheets the tables went into SQL Server with the Access forms left in front. Either way the resource planner and fee tracker stayed in Excel, and the project folders sit on the office server or in SharePoint.

Its stages are still labelled A to L, the RIBA work stages from before 2013, so someone keeps a table mapping them to the stages 0 to 7 of the RIBA Plan of Work, and every monthly fee report passes through it. The partner who built the FileMaker version runs projects now and has no time to open it, and the contractor stopped answering years ago. It opens on the machines in the studio and nowhere else.

Between 2016 and 2022 the same job went into a browser. A freelancer or a small agency wrote a timesheet and resourcing system in PHP or React, Angular or Node, or the associate who looked after the office computers assembled one in Power Apps. From the studio it looks current: a timesheet filled in on a phone after a site visit, the resource plan as coloured bars across the coming weeks, a fee page for every project.

The fee stages are what hold it back. They were built for the practice's standard appointment, so every project with a different stage split, or a fee worked out as a percentage of construction cost, is tracked in a spreadsheet beside the system, and the monthly invoice figures come from that spreadsheet. The stage list is shared by every project, so a change made for one job moves the fee earned on all of them, and since that happened once nobody has touched it. The freelancer answers an email every few weeks. Since 2023 a few practices have started over in an AI app builder, and those stalled where the timesheets had to meet the fees. Every new project goes in on the standard split, and the spreadsheet corrects it.

It tells the directors, project by project, what the fee was, what the time has cost and what can be invoiced this month.

The gap between fee and time spent is where a practice makes or loses money on a job, and this system shows it while there is still a stage left to act on. Every hour is booked to a project and a stage and every grade carries a cost rate, so a stage that has used most of its fee with the drawings half done shows up that month, not at the final account.

The invoices come out of the same records. The project architect marks the stage progress, the draft follows, and the office manager sends it without redoing the sums. Additional services sit apart until the client agrees them, so the practice can show what was asked for and when.

The resource plan answers the question behind every new enquiry: who could do the work, and when.

Systems like this keep producing the fee report. What has changed is everything around it.

The Building Safety duties have nowhere to live. The Building Regulations principal designer and principal contractor dutyholder roles and competence requirements apply from 1 October 2023, with gateway approvals by the Building Safety Regulator for higher-risk buildings. A practice needs appointment and competence records for each project, and neither the FileMaker file nor the agency's system has a field for them, so they live in a folder and a spreadsheet.

CPD is kept somewhere else. The ARB's CPD scheme became mandatory for registered architects from 2025, with fire and life safety and environmental sustainability as mandatory topics, recorded per architect. The old CPD screen was a training log with a date and a course title, so each architect's record is kept by hand beside it.

The machines under it have run out of dates. Windows 10 support ended in October 2025, and the Access version often runs on Windows 10 PCs. SQL Server 2016 updates ended in July 2026, and SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 ended on 14 July 2026, which covers the library many project folders sit in.

The fees still pass through Excel. In both generations the fee tracker and resource planner are spreadsheets fed from the system, so the directors' Monday figures are as old as the last copy. Invoice drafts are retyped into the accounts package, and the route a fee invoice takes needs settling before electronic invoicing becomes mandatory for business-to-business VAT invoices from April 2029.

The same projects and fee stages, opened in a browser or on a phone, with the side spreadsheets folded in.

Every fee basis on the project. A lump sum by stage, a percentage of construction cost recalculated when the cost plan changes, or hourly, with the stage split set per project. The spreadsheet for the awkward projects goes, and the A to L stages are mapped once, on the record.

Fee earned against time cost as the week locks. Monday's locked timesheets priced at the April grade rates against each stage's fee, on a page the directors read that afternoon.

Invoice drafts from stage progress. The project architect's percentage complete drafts the invoice, capped at the stage fee until a variation is agreed, and the draft reaches the accounts package without being retyped.

Additional services with the agreement attached. Each request recorded against the project with the client's written agreement, and nothing invoiced until it is there.

Appointments, dutyholder roles and CPD in the records. The principal designer or principal contractor role and competence evidence on each project, gateway dates for higher-risk buildings, and each architect's CPD against the mandatory topics.

The resource plan beside the fee left. Who is booked on what in the coming weeks, next to the fee each stage has left, from the studio, home or site, with one login, a supported database and a tested backup.

Whichever generation the practice has, it stays in use while this happens, and each new piece sits next to it on the records it already keeps.

In the checks and the looking back that happen around the fees, never in the design.

Each of these works on records the system already holds and leaves the decision with a person.

Timesheets checked before the week locks. The office manager reads every timesheet for time booked to a closed stage, a person on a project they are not resourced on, or a week short of contracted hours. AI reads them against the stage list and the resource plan and lists only the entries that do not fit. In a practice of 40, reading 40 timesheets at five minutes each takes over three hours of a Monday morning; a dozen flagged lines at two or three minutes each take half an hour.

Emails that ask for more than the appointment. A client asking for another layout option or an extra meeting may be asking for work outside the appointment. AI flags those emails and drafts a note for the project architect to agree a fee. Written from the email rather than pieced together at month end, each note takes a quarter of an hour less, and twenty requests a month works out at five hours.

A first fee proposal from the practice's own history. For a new enquiry, AI finds similar past projects in the register and drafts a proposal from their stages and the time each stage took, for a director to price. At four proposals a month, pulling those hours from old timesheet reports at half a day each comes to two days; checking the drafts at about an hour each comes to half a day.

Questions put to the records in plain words. Which stage 4 projects have used most of their fee? Who is free in three weeks? AI answers from the timesheets, fees and resource plan, showing the records it used. Before the directors' Monday meeting, lining the planner up with the fee tracker at a minute a project across 60 live projects adds up to an hour, which the answers replace.

Not worth doing: AI producing drawings, or estimating the construction cost a fee is worked from. The drawings belong in the design software and the cost plan is the cost consultant's, and a fee resting on a model's guess at the build cost is one no director could defend to a client.

All four depend on timesheet and fee records that can be changed without risk, which comes with the first stage and not before. The assessment shows which of the four would pay back first here.

Make the data safe first, then take the fees out of the spreadsheet, with the old system in use until the end.

1. Stabilise. The FileMaker file, or the Access database and its SQL Server tables, copied and checked against the version in daily use, the Excel planner and fee tracker collected, the SharePoint project folders listed, the database on a supported version, a backup restored as a test, and a copy to try changes on. This goes first because every figure a director reads comes out of that data, and Windows 10, SQL Server 2016 and SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 have all passed their dates.
2. Fees and stages in a browser. Every fee basis and stage split, reading and writing the existing data, the A to L mapping settled, with the fee tracker kept beside it until a month's figures agree.
3. Timesheets and invoice drafts. The week filled in at a desk or on a phone, the Monday lock kept, and drafts passed to the accounts package.
4. Resourcing, appointments and CPD. Each priced as a stage of its own.
5. Retire the old system once nothing is typed into it. The directors' resource spreadsheet tends to be the last thing closed.

The assessment is from £395 + VAT, sized on a free one-hour consultation, with an exact price before you commit. For a project and fee system that means a few days with the directors, the office manager and the data, finding the fee rules, the stage mapping and the spreadsheets behind the reports, and a report with costed options and a fixed price for each. Each stage after that is priced before you commit to it. How we work, what drives the price and the payment terms each have a page.