Architecture projects follow a predictable structure, and your time tracking should mirror it. Most firms bill based on the five standard AIA phases: schematic design, design development, construction documents, bidding and negotiation, and construction administration. Each phase gets a portion of the total fee, and every hour your team logs should be coded to the project and the specific phase where that time was spent.

The fee allocation usually follows a rough pattern. Schematic design might get 15% of the total fee, design development 20%, construction documents 40%, bidding 5%, and construction administration 20%. These percentages shift depending on the project type and your agreement with the client, but the point is that each phase has a defined budget in both dollars and the hours those dollars buy at your billing rates.

This is where the real tracking happens. When someone on your team spends three hours working on floor plan revisions during design development, those three hours get logged to that project’s DD phase. When a principal spends an hour in a client meeting during schematic design, that hour hits SD. Everyone on the project logs time daily, assigned to the correct phase. No batching it at the end of the week from memory.

The value shows up when you compare actual hours burned against the fee for each phase. Say you budgeted 80 hours for construction documents on a $12,000 CD fee. At 60 hours in, you’re already at 75% of the budget and only halfway through the drawing set. That’s a problem you can address now rather than discovering after the fact that you lost money. Without phase-level tracking, you just know the project “felt like a lot of work” but can’t pinpoint where the overrun happened.

For tools, QuickBooks Online Projects works for smaller firms that want to keep everything in one system. You create a project, assign income and expenses to it, and track time by team member. It handles the basics but doesn’t give you the phase-level granularity natively without some creative setup using sub-projects or tags. Architecture-specific tools like BQE Core and Monograph are built for this exact workflow. They let you define phases, set fee allocations, track hours against phase budgets, and generate reports showing exactly where you stand on every active project. The investment in a purpose-built tool usually pays for itself once you have more than a handful of projects running simultaneously.

Don’t forget to track non-billable project time separately. Internal coordination, filing, and admin hours that relate to a project but aren’t billable still cost you money. Knowing that a project consumed 120 total hours but only 95 were billable tells you something important about your overhead on that project type.

Reimbursable expenses like printing, plotting, travel to the job site, and consultant fees need to land on the correct project too. These pass through to the client but only if you capture them. Missed reimbursables are pure profit loss. Professional service firms like architecture practices often underestimate how much revenue slips away from uncaptured reimbursables and time that never gets logged.

Over time, this data becomes your most valuable business asset. You’ll see patterns. Maybe residential projects consistently blow through the CD phase budget. Maybe construction administration always comes in under budget because you estimated conservatively. That historical data lets you price future projects more accurately and staff them more realistically.

If your current system is a mess or you’re running everything from spreadsheets that nobody updates, start by getting your accounting foundation right. Our Wisconsin small business bookkeeping services can help you set up project-level tracking in QuickBooks so your financial reports actually show profitability by project and phase rather than just a single revenue number for the whole firm. Clean books make everything else possible.